Salk Institute | FrogHeart

The Salk Institute wouldn’t have been my first guess for the science partner in this art and science project, which will be examining museum visitor behaviour. From the September 28, 2022 Salk Institute news release (also on EurekAlert and a copy received via email) announcing the project grant,

Clay vessels of innumerable shapes and sizes come to life as they illuminate a rich history of symbolic meanings and identity. Some museum visitors may lean in to get a better view, while others converse with their friends over the rich hues. Exhibition designers have long wondered how the human brain senses, perceives, and learns in the rich environment of a museum gallery.
In a synthesis of science and art, Salk scientists have teamed up with curators and design experts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to study how nearly 100,000 museum visitors respond to exhibition design. The goal of the project, funded by a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is to better understand how people perceive, make choices in, interact with, and learn from a complex environment, and to further enhance the educational mission of museums through evidence-based design strategies.
The Salk team is led by Professor Thomas Albright, Salk Fellow Talmo Pereira, and Staff Scientist Sergei Gepshtein.
The experimental exhibition at LACMA—called “Conversing in Clay: Ceramics from the LACMA Collection”—is open until May 21, 2023.
“LACMA is one of the world’s greatest art museums, so it is wonderful to be able to combine its expertise with our knowledge of brain function and behavior,” says Albright, director of Salk’s Vision Center Laboratory and Conrad T. Prebys Chair in Vision Research. “The beauty of this project is that it extends our laboratory research on perception, memory, and decision-making into the real world.”
Albright and Gepshtein study the visual system and how it informs decisions and behaviors. A major focus of their work is uncovering how perception guides movement in space. Pereira’s expertise lies in measuring and quantifying behaviors. He invented a deep learning technique called SLEAP [Social LEAP Estimates Animal Poses (SLEAP)], which precisely captures the movements of organisms, from single cells to whales, using conventional videography. This technology has enabled scientists to describe behaviors with unprecedented precision.
For this project, the scientists have placed 10 video cameras throughout a LACMA gallery. The researchers will record how the museum environment shapes behaviors as visitors move through the space, including preferred viewing locations, paths and rates of movement, postures, social interactions, gestures, and expressions. Those behaviors will, in turn, provide novel insights into the underlying perceptual and cognitive processes that guide our engagement with works of art. The scientists will also test strategic modifications to gallery design to produce the most rewarding experience.
“We plan to capture every behavior that every person does while visiting the exhibit,” Pereira says. “For example, how long they stand in front an object, whether they’re talking to a friend or even scratching their head. Then we can use this data to predict how the visitor will act next, such as if they will visit another object in the exhibit or if they leave instead.”
Results from the study will help inform future exhibit design and visitor experience and provide an unprecedented quantitative look at how human systems for perception and memory lead to predictable decisions and actions in a rich sensory environment.
“As a museum that has a long history of melding art with science and technology, we are thrilled to partner with the Salk Institute for this study,” says Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg director. “LACMA is always striving to create accessible, engaging gallery environments for all visitors. We look forward to applying what we learn to our approach to gallery design and to enhance visitor experience.”
Next, the scientists plan to employ this experimental approach to gain a better understanding of how the design of environments for people with specific needs, like school-age children or patients with dementia, might improve cognitive processes and behaviors.
Several members of the research team are also members of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, which seeks to promote and advance knowledge that links neuroscience research to a growing understanding of human responses to the built environment.
Gepshtein is also a member of Salk’s Center for the Neurobiology of Vision and director of the Collaboratory for Adaptive Sensory Technologies. Additionally, he serves as the director of the Center for Spatial Perception & Concrete Experience at the University of Southern California.
About the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:
LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection of more than 149,000 objects that illuminate 6,000 years of artistic expression across the globe. Committed to showcasing a multitude of art histories, LACMA exhibits and interprets works of art from new and unexpected points of view that are informed by the region’s rich cultural heritage and diverse population. LACMA’s spirit of experimentation is reflected in its work with artists, technologists, and thought leaders as well as in its regional, national, and global partnerships to share collections and programs, create pioneering initiatives, and engage new audiences.
About the Salk Institute for Biological Studies:
Every cure has a starting point. The Salk Institute embodies Jonas Salk’s mission to dare to make dreams into reality. Its internationally renowned and award-winning scientists explore the very foundations of life, seeking new understandings in neuroscience, genetics, immunology, plant biology, and more. The Institute is an independent nonprofit organization and architectural landmark: small by choice, intimate by nature, and fearless in the face of any challenge. Be it cancer or Alzheimer’s, aging or diabetes, Salk is where cures begin. Learn more at: salk.edu.

I find this image quite intriguing,

Caption: Motion capture technology is used to classify human behavior in an art exhibition. Credit: Salk Institute

I’m trying to figure out how they’ll do this. Will each visitor be ‘tagged’ as they enter the LACMA gallery so they can be ‘followed’ individually as they respond (or don’t respond) to the exhibits? Will they be notified that they are participating in a study?

I was tracked without my knowledge or consent at the Vancouver (Canada) Art Gallery’s (VAG) exhibition, “The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (March 5, 2022 – October 23, 2022). It was disconcerting to find out that my ‘tracks’ had become part of a real time installation. (The result of my trip to the VAG was a two-part commentary: “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Artificial Intelligence at the Vancouver [Canada] Art Gallery [1 of 2]: The Objects” and “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Artificial Intelligence at the Vancouver [Canada] Art Gallery [2 of 2]: Meditations”. My response to the experience can be found under the ‘Eeek’ subhead of part 2: Meditations. For the curious, part 1: The Objects is here.)

The answer to the question about whether brains and plants are alike is the standard ‘yes and no’. That said, there are some startling similarities from a statistical perspective (from a July 6, 2017 Salk Institute news release (also received via email; Note: Links have been removed),

Plants and brains are more alike than you might think: Salk scientists discovered that the mathematical rules governing how plants grow are similar to how brain cells sprout connections. The new work, published in Current Biology on July 6, 2017, and based on data from 3D laser scanning of plants, suggests there may be universal rules of logic governing branching growth across many biological systems.

“Our project was motivated by the question of whether, despite all the diversity we see in plant forms, there is some form or structure they all share,” says Saket Navlakha, assistant professor in Salk’s Center for Integrative Biology and senior author of the paper. “We discovered that there is—and, surprisingly, the variation in how branches are distributed in space can be described mathematically by something called a Gaussian function, which is also known as a bell curve.”

Being immobile, plants have to find creative strategies for adjusting their architecture to address environmental challenges, like being shaded by a neighbor. The diversity in plant forms, from towering redwoods to creeping thyme, is a visible sign of these strategies, but Navlakha wondered if there was some unseen organizing principle at work. To find out, his team used high-precision 3D scanning technology to measure the architecture of young plants over time and quantify their growth in ways that could be analyzed mathematically.

“This collaboration arose from a conversation that Saket and I had shortly after his arrival at Salk,” says Professor and Director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory Joanne Chory, who, along with being the Howard H. and Maryam R. Newman Chair in Plant Biology, is also a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator and one of the paper’s coauthors. “We were able to fund our studies thanks to Salk’s innovation grant program and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.”

The team began with three agriculturally valuable crops: sorghum, tomato and tobacco. The researchers grew the plants from seeds under conditions the plants might experience naturally (shade, ambient light, high light, high heat and drought). Every few days for a month, first author Adam Conn scanned each plant to digitally capture its growth. In all, Conn scanned almost 600 plants.

“We basically scanned the plants like you would scan a piece of paper,” says Conn, a Salk research assistant. “But in this case the technology is 3D and allows us to capture a complete form—the full architecture of how the plant grows and distributes branches in space.”

From left: Adam Conn and Saket Navlakha Credit: Salk Institute

Each plant’s digital representation is called a point cloud, a set of 3D coordinates in space that can be analyzed computationally. With the new data, the team built a statistical description of theoretically possible plant shapes by studying the plant’s branch density function. The branch density function depicts the likelihood of finding a branch at any point in the space surrounding a plant.

This model revealed three properties of growth: separability, self-similarity and a Gaussian branch density function. Separability means that growth in one spatial direction is independent of growth in other directions. According to Navlakha, this property means that growth is very simple and modular, which may let plants be more resilient to changes in their environment. Self-similarity means that all the plants have the same underlying shape, even though some plants may be stretched a little more in one direction, or squeezed in another direction. In other words, plants don’t use different statistical rules to grow in shade than they do to grow in bright light. Lastly, the team found that, regardless of plant species or growth conditions, branch density data followed a Gaussian distribution that is truncated at the boundary of the plant. Basically, this says that branch growth is densest near the plant’s center and gets less dense farther out following a bell curve.

The high level of evolutionary efficiency suggested by these properties is surprising. Even though it would be inefficient for plants to evolve different growth rules for every type of environmental condition, the researchers did not expect to find that plants would be so efficient as to develop only a single functional form. The properties they identified in this work may help researchers evaluate new strategies for genetically engineering crops.

Previous work by one of the paper’s authors, Charles Stevens, a professor in Salk’s Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory, found the same three mathematical properties at work in brain neurons. “The similarity between neuronal arbors and plant shoots is quite striking, and it seems like there must be an underlying reason,” says Stevens. “Probably, they both need to cover a territory as completely as possible but in a very sparse way so they don’t interfere with each other.”

The next challenge for the team is to identify what might be some of the mechanisms at the molecular level driving these changes. Navlakha adds, “We could see whether these principles deviate in other agricultural species and maybe use that knowledge in selecting plants to improve crop yields.”

Should you not be able to access the news release, you can find the information in a July 6, 2017 news item on ScienceDaily.

For the paper, here’s a link and a citation,

A Statistical Description of Plant Shoot Architecture by Adam Conn, Ullas V. Pedmale4, Joanne Chory, Charles F. Stevens, Saket Navlakha. Current Biology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.06.009 Publication stage: In Press Corrected Proof July 2017

This paper is behind a paywall.

Here’s an image that illustrates the principles the researchers are attempting to establish,

This illustration represents how plants use the same rules to grow under widely different conditions (for example, cloudy versus sunny), and that the density of branches in space follows a Gaussian (“bell curve”) distribution, which is also true of neuronal branches in the brain. Credit: Salk Institute

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Are plants and brains alike?