The Pic System: A Tool for the Exploration of Some Interesting Biological and Psychological Processes
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1992
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
The corticocortical pathway in primates which begins in striate cortex and terminates in inferior temporal cortex has been conclusively linked to the recognition, storage, and learning of visual objects. Neurons in this area are responsive to very complex stimuli, including ones as specific as monkey hands and faces. This responsiveness is position and size independent. The task of isolating the specific stimuli to which a given neuron responds is very difficult. To this extent we have proposed and designed the Pic system. The Pic system employs a genetic search strategy, Genetic Algorithm, to search for optimal visual images given objective evaluation of the images. In a number of interesting model tasks the System has been shown to perform admirably. It can find reasonably good solutions to visual problems in a fairly short time. We reasonably believe that the use of neuron firing rate as image evaluator would serve to evolve an image reflecting the neuron's particular selective criteria. The Pic system is also an interesting tool for the study of natural selection and its exploitation of hierarchical structure. The system was carefully designed for robustness as a genetic algorithm and several experiments were conducted to illustrate this.