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A signature of neural coding at human perceptual limits

Simple visual features, such as orientation, are thought to be represented in the spiking of visual neurons using population codes. I show that optimal decoding of such activity predicts characteristic deviations from the normal distribution of errors at low gains. Examining human perception of orie...

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Autor principal: Bays, Paul M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5024667/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27604067
http://dx.doi.org/10.1167/16.11.4
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author Bays, Paul M.
author_facet Bays, Paul M.
author_sort Bays, Paul M.
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description Simple visual features, such as orientation, are thought to be represented in the spiking of visual neurons using population codes. I show that optimal decoding of such activity predicts characteristic deviations from the normal distribution of errors at low gains. Examining human perception of orientation stimuli, I show that these predicted deviations are present at near-threshold levels of contrast. The findings may provide a neural-level explanation for the appearance of a threshold in perceptual awareness whereby stimuli are categorized as seen or unseen. As well as varying in error magnitude, perceptual judgments differ in certainty about what was observed. I demonstrate that variations in the total spiking activity of a neural population can account for the empirical relationship between subjective confidence and precision. These results establish population coding and decoding as the neural basis of perception and perceptual confidence.
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spelling pubmed-50246672016-09-16 A signature of neural coding at human perceptual limits Bays, Paul M. J Vis Article Simple visual features, such as orientation, are thought to be represented in the spiking of visual neurons using population codes. I show that optimal decoding of such activity predicts characteristic deviations from the normal distribution of errors at low gains. Examining human perception of orientation stimuli, I show that these predicted deviations are present at near-threshold levels of contrast. The findings may provide a neural-level explanation for the appearance of a threshold in perceptual awareness whereby stimuli are categorized as seen or unseen. As well as varying in error magnitude, perceptual judgments differ in certainty about what was observed. I demonstrate that variations in the total spiking activity of a neural population can account for the empirical relationship between subjective confidence and precision. These results establish population coding and decoding as the neural basis of perception and perceptual confidence. The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology 2016-09-07 /pmc/articles/PMC5024667/ /pubmed/27604067 http://dx.doi.org/10.1167/16.11.4 Text en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
spellingShingle Article
Bays, Paul M.
A signature of neural coding at human perceptual limits
title A signature of neural coding at human perceptual limits
title_full A signature of neural coding at human perceptual limits
title_fullStr A signature of neural coding at human perceptual limits
title_full_unstemmed A signature of neural coding at human perceptual limits
title_short A signature of neural coding at human perceptual limits
title_sort signature of neural coding at human perceptual limits
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5024667/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27604067
http://dx.doi.org/10.1167/16.11.4
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