Investigation of Conscious Visual Perception via Visual Stimulus Propagation through a 3D-SNN Brain Model

In this study, we investigate the propagation of information about visual stimuli through the brain. In our previous work, we designed a three-dimensional spiking neural network (3D-SNN) structure based on an available brain atlas for this aim. It was trained via reverse engineering, i.e., by feeding EEG recordings from a human subject during preparation for the performance of a visual task into the positions of the electrodes on the skull and letting the synapses adapt via spike-timing dependent plasticity rule. In the current work, a visual stimulus consisting of a sequence of images of dots with varying positions was processed by spatiotemporal filters mimicking retinal ganglion cells and was fed as generating currents to the neurons in the brain sensory relay - the thalamus. The study aims to observe the propagation of the visual stimulus information and stages of its conscious perception.