CBB Seminar | Social Seminar ~ Lynn K.A. Sörensen, Post Doc, MIT
Date and Time
April 23, 2026
12:00PM - 01:15PM EDT
Location
Northwest Building - B101 Auditorium
52 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138 | Harvard ID card needed for NW Bldg entry
CBB Seminar
Lynn K.A. Sörensen ~ Post-doctoral Fellow, McGovern Institute for Brain Research (DiCarlo Group), MIT
How does the primate brain coordinate plasticity when learning to discriminate new objects? In this talk, I will present results from a series of neurophysiological and computational modeling experiments investigating how object training changes representations in the primate ventral visual stream. Specifically, I will characterize how learning to discriminate new objects reshapes neural activity in macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex, resulting in increased object selectivity, enhanced linear separability, and more invariant representations compared to task-naïve animals. I will then introduce a computational framework using anatomically-mapped artificial neural network models of the ventral stream to ask why IT changed to the degree we observed. Our simulations showed that gradient-based task optimization accurately approximates the measured changes and predicts novel training-induced phenomena. Finally, I will discuss what these findings suggest about the usefulness of task optimization via gradient descent for understanding long-term training-induced plasticity in sensory cortices.
***CBB and Social talks this semester will be meet on Thursdays, 12:00-1:15pm at NORTHWEST Bldg, B101 AUDITORIUM Harvard HUID card needed for entry to NW Bldg.***