Naselaris Lab
Principal Investigator: Thomas P Naselaris
Institution: University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Program Director/Principal Investigator (Last, First, Middle): Naselaris, Thomas PROJECT SUMMARY We propose to amass a large sampling brain activity as humans internally generate mental images. The proposed Mental Imagery Database (MID) will use high-resolution 7T fMRI to achieve large-scale sampling of brain activity during mental imagery, a timely project directly motivated by the rise of generative AI. Of the many use cases we envision, we see two as especially urgent: (1) MID will be used by neuroscientists and AI researchers to gain insights into how the brain transforms text into novel visual representations. This operation is central to current AI research and distinguishes humans from other biological intelligences. Although AI image generators have become better at making pictures than most humans, they still struggle with visual interpretations of written information that humans find easy. Very little is currently known about how human brains do this. MID will provide the needed neuroimaging data at a scale that is matched to the complexity of the problem. (2) MID will advance recent work on visual decoding that has made great strides reconstructing seen images. Such work…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01EY038606-02: CRCNS Data Sharing Proposal: One hundred thousand mental images (2026)
- 1R01EY038606-01: CRCNS Data Sharing Proposal: One hundred thousand mental images (2025)
- 5R01EY023384-09: Seen and mental images in visual cortex (2025)
- 5R01EY023384-08: Seen and mental images in visual cortex (2024)
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