[koglist] [CDC Seminars] CogSci CEU Departmental Colloquium: June 13 Wednesday: Alexandre Pouget: Not noisy, just wrong

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) ! _______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-subscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-unsubscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu