During natural vision, semantic novelty modulates fixation-related processing in primate cortex

Primate vision relies on eye movements to sample the world, yet how the brain integrates high-level meaning across these "snapshots" remains a mystery. By combining deep-learning models with massive electrophysiological datasets from humans and macaques, we show that the brain predicts the semantic content of upcoming fixations. We identified a "semantic novelty" signal that modulates neural activity across the primate cortex, appearing in frontal areas even before a saccade is completed. These findings reveal that visual processing is not a series of independent glimpses, but a continuous, predictive process that integrates foveal information across space and time. This work bridges biological vision and artificial intelligence, providing a new framework for how the brain maintains a coherent understanding of a dynamic world.