Dear All, The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Center for Cognitive Computation (CCC) invites you to the upcoming meeting of the Budapest Computational Neuroscience Forum<https://ccc.ceu.edu/budapest-computational-neuroscience-forum>um>. Speaker: Ferenc Csikor, Wigner Institute<https://wigner.hu/en/infopages/csikor.ferenc> Top-down perceptual inference shaping the activity of early visual cortex Deep discriminative models have recently provided remarkable insights into hierarchical processing in the brain by predicting neural activity along the visual ventral pathway. However, these models are at odds with biological systems both at the computational and architectural levels: on the computational level, deep discriminative models rely on supervised learning, which necessitates exhaustive labeling of experiences; and on architectural level, these models are fundamentally feed-forward in processing incoming stimuli, in contrast with the ventral pathway that is characterized by extensive top-down connectivity. Here, we address these issues by developing a hierarchical deep generative model of natural images and show that it can predict an extensive set of experimental results in the primary and secondary visual cortices (V1 and V2, respectively). Our analysis shows that sensitivity of V2 neurons to subtle changes of high-level statistics of images is a consequence of learning a hierarchical representation of natural images. Further, we show that top-down influences are natural ingredients of hierarchical generative models, and a range of experimental phenomena concerning the mean responses and noise correlation structure of V1 responses are a consequence of inference in this generative model. Time: 17:00, October 25, 2023. Location: CEU, 1051 Bp. Nádor u. 15, FT. room 408. (restricted entry, guest cards will be available at the reception) and Zoom (Meeting ID: 913 1139 5317<https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/91311395317?pwd=eFhHRkNkSWw0OXhyT1JBb2tVTkZWUT09> Passcode: 290844) Should you have any inquiries about the series, please contact Mihály Bányai<mailto:mihaly.s.banyai@gmail.com>. Best regards, Ildikó Ildikó Varga Department Coordinator (Budapest) Department of Cognitive Science [cid:343a9326-cd32-44b2-8902-2a9a6c2f1c29] H-1051 Budapest Nador u. 15. FT room 404 tel: +36-1 327-3000 2941 http://www.ceu.edu<http://www.ceu.edu/> http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu<http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/> ______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu