Seminars

Primate vision relies on eye movements to sample the world, yet how the brain integrates high-level meaning across these “snapshots” remains a mystery. By combining deep-learning models with massive electrophysiological datasets from humans and macaques, we show that the brain responds to changes in semantic content between fixations. We identified a “semantic novelty” signal that modulates neural activity across the primate cortex, appearing in frontal areas before a saccade is completed. These findings suggest visual processing is not a series of independent glimpses, but a continuous process integrating foveal information at the semantic level. This work bridges biological vision and artificial intelligence, providing a new framework for understanding how the brain maintains a coherent understanding of a dynamic world.