Gondur, Rabia, Stan, Patricia L, Smith, Matthew A, Cowley, Benjamin R (2026) A TALE OF TWO TAILS: PREFERRED AND ANTI-PREFERRED NATURAL STIMULI IN VISUAL CORTEX. In: International Conference on Learning Representations, April 23rd-27th, 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Abstract
An ongoing quest in neuroscience is to find the preferred stimulus of a sensory neuron. This search lays the foundation for understanding how selectivity emerges in the primate visual stream-from simple edge-detecting neurons to highly-selective face neurons-as well as for the architectures and activation functions of deep neural networks. The prevailing notion is that a visual neuron primarily responds to a single preferred visual feature, like an oriented edge or the shape of an object, resulting in a "one-tailed" distribution of responses to natural images. However, surprisingly, we instead find "two-tailed" response distributions of primate visual cortical neurons, suggesting that these neurons have both preferred and anti-preferred stimuli. We experimentally validated anti-preferred stimuli by recording responses from macaque V4 to model-optimized stimuli. We find that these anti-preferred stimuli are important for describing a neuron's tuning, as both preferred and anti-preferred images are needed to predict a neuron's responses to natural images. Moreover, in a psychophysics task, humans rely on anti-preferred images to interpret and predict V4 stimulus tuning; this was not the case for internal units from a deep neural network. Interestingly, we find no discernible differences in image statistics between preferred and anti-preferred images. This suggests that by encoding anti-preferred features, a V4 population seemingly doubles its capacity for feature selectivity, allowing for a more flexible downstream readout. Overall, we establish anti-preferred stimuli as an important encoding property of V4 neurons. Our work embarks on a new quest in neuroscience to search for anti-preferred stimuli along the visual stream and offers a new perspective on how feature selectivity arises in the visual cortex and deep neural networks.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions > tissues types and functions organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions > tissues types and functions > visual cortex |
| CSHL Authors: | |
| Communities: | CSHL labs > Cowley lab |
| SWORD Depositor: | CSHL Elements |
| Depositing User: | CSHL Elements |
| Date: | 2026 |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Aug 2026 13:12 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Aug 2026 13:12 |
| PMCID: | PMC13440251 |
| URI: | https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/42287 |
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