Brain-like border ownership signals support prediction of natural videos

Zeyuan Ye; Ralf Wessel; Tom P Franken

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2025.112199

Brain-like border ownership signals support prediction of natural videos

iScience. 2025 Mar 11;28(4):112199. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.112199. eCollection 2025 Apr 18.

Authors

Zeyuan Ye¹, Ralf Wessel¹, Tom P Franken²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.
² Department of Neuroscience, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA.

Abstract

To make sense of visual scenes, the brain must segment foreground from background. This is thought to be facilitated by neurons that signal border ownership (BOS), which indicate which side of a border in their receptive field is owned by an object. How these signals emerge without a teaching signal of what is foreground remains unclear. Here we find that many units in PredNet, a self-supervised deep neural network trained to predict future frames in natural videos, are selective for BOS. They share key properties with BOS neurons in the brain, including robustness to object transformations and hysteresis. Ablation revealed that BOS units contribute more to prediction than other units for videos with moving objects. Our findings suggest that BOS neurons might emerge due to an evolutionary or developmental pressure to predict future input in natural, complex dynamic environments, even without an explicit requirement to segment foreground from background.

Keywords: Behavioral neuroscience; Neuroscience; Social sciences.

Associated data

figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.28533842