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MIT Colloquium on Brain and Cognition
Probabilistic inference in neural circuits: from insects to humans.
Speaker: Alexandre Pouget, PhD, Associate Professor, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: 46-3002
A wide range of behaviors can be formalized as instances of probabilistic inferences. This includes odor recognition in insects, navigation in rodents, auditory localization in barn owls, decision making in primates and causal reasoning in humans, to name just a few. In all cases, the probabilistic inferences involve products of distributions and marginalization. We will show that, given the type of variability reported in neural responses, products of distributions can be implemented through linear operations over firing rates, while marginalization over Gaussian random variables requires a particular nonlinearity known as quadratic divisive normalization. Both operations are conspicuous in many neural circuits raising the possibility that seemingly unrelated behaviors could in fact rely on very similar neural mechanisms across different species. In addition, we will present experimental evidence that humans perception is akin to a sampling process, which supports the notion that humans also use sampling to solve complex Bayesian inferences.
Website: http://mit.edu/bcs/newsevents/colloquia.shtml
Open to: the general public
For More Information Contact: Kathleen V. Dickey
617-324-5399
kvdickey@mit.edu
Event Category: humanities/social sciences
science/engineering
