The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to a talk
(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Alexandre Pouget
Dept of basic Neuroscience
Universite de Geneve
Date: Wednesday, June 13, 2012 - 17:00 - 18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Frankel Leó út 30-34.,
Room G15
Not noisy, just wrong
Abstract
Behavior varies from trial to trial even when the stimulus is
maintained as constant as possible. One of the most important questions
in neuroscience concerns the origin of this variability. In many models,
it is attributed to noise within the brain, often in the form of
independent Poisson variability in spike trains, or variations thereof.
Here, we show that suboptimal inference caused by the deterministic
approximations of the statistical structure of the sensory inputs
provides another major cause of variability. Importantly, we argue that
in most tasks of interest, and particularly complex ones, this cause of
variability is likely to be the dominant component of behavioral
variability. This perspective explains a variety of intriguing
observations, including why variability appears to be larger on the
sensory than on the motor side, and why our sensors are sometimes
surprisingly unreliable.
We're looking forward to see you there (Frankel Leo u. 30-34) !
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