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Published VersionCC BY V4.0, Open Access
Journal article
Neural tuning instantiates prior expectations in the human visual system
Nature Communications, Vol.14, pp.1-12
2023
PMID: 37658039
Abstract
Perception is often modelled as a process of active inference, whereby prior expectations are combined with noisy sensory measurements to estimate the structure of the world. This mathematical framework has proven critical to understanding perception, cognition, motor control, and social interaction. While theoretical work has shown how priors can be computed from environmental statistics, their neural instantiation could be realised through multiple competing encoding schemes. Using a data-driven approach, here we extract the brain’s representation of visual orientation and compare this with simulations from different sensory coding schemes. We found that the tuning of the human visual system is highly conditional on stimulus-specific variations in a way that is not predicted by previous proposals. We further show that the adopted encoding scheme effectively embeds an environmental prior for natural image statistics within the sensory measurement, providing the functional architecture necessary for optimal inference in the earliest stages of cortical processing.
Details
- Title
- Neural tuning instantiates prior expectations in the human visual system
- Authors
- William J. Harrison (Author) - The University of QueenslandPaul M. Bays (Author) - University of CambridgeReuben Rideaux (Corresponding Author) - The University of Queensland
- Publication details
- Nature Communications, Vol.14, pp.1-12
- Publisher
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date published
- 2023
- DOI
- 10.1038/s41467-023-41027-w
- ISSN
- 2041-1723
- PMID
- 37658039
- Copyright note
- © The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Data Availability
- The EEG data generated in this study have been deposited in the following OSF database: https://osf.io/5ba9y/. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Source data are provided with this paper.
- Grant note
- This work was supported by Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship to PMB (106926).
- Organisation Unit
- School of Health - Psychology
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99996797202621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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- Domestic collaboration
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- Web Of Science research areas
- Neurosciences