STSBench: A Large-Scale Dataset for Modeling Neuronal Activity in the Dorsal Stream of Primate Visual Cortex
Building a massive brain dataset to decode how primates perceive motion and space
Researchers created STSBench, a dataset of recordings from over 2,000 neurons in a motion-sensing region of macaque brains—50 times larger than any previous collection—gathered while the animals watched thousands of natural videos. The dataset enables new computational models that predict how individual brain cells respond to movement and spatial information, and can even reconstruct what a monkey is watching based on its brain activity alone.
The ventral visual stream (object recognition) is already well-understood through similar datasets and neural models, but the dorsal stream (motion and spatial awareness) has lagged behind because neuroscientists lacked comparable data. STSBench closes that gap, allowing researchers to finally build and test theories about how brains encode motion and spatial navigation—work that could illuminate both healthy vision and how these processes break down in disease, and potentially improve artificial vision systems designed to interpret movement and space.