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Optimal representation of sensory information by neural populations

Nature Neuroscience volume 9, pages 690–696 (2006)Cite this article

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Abstract

Sensory information is encoded by populations of neurons. The responses of individual neurons are inherently noisy, so the brain must interpret this information as reliably as possible. In most situations, the optimal strategy for decoding the population signal is to compute the likelihoods of the stimuli that are consistent with an observed neural response. But it has not been clear how the brain can directly compute likelihoods. Here we present a simple and biologically plausible model that can realize the likelihood function by computing a weighted sum of sensory neuron responses. The model provides the basis for an optimal decoding of sensory information. It explains a variety of psychophysical observations on detection, discrimination and identification, and it also directly predicts the relative contributions that different sensory neurons make to perceptual judgments.

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Figure 1: Computing the log likelihood function in a feedforward network.
Figure 2: Computing likelihood for the direction of motion.
Figure 3: Predictions of the model for behavioral performance in psychophysical tasks.
Figure 4: Contributions of MT signals to two-choice motion discrimination.

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Notes

  1. *NOTE: In the supplementary information initially published online to accompany this article, equation 5 and the last two equations on page 4 contained typographical errors. The errors have been corrected online.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a research grant from the US National Institutes of Health (EY2017). We thank P. Latham, B. Lau and E.P. Simoncelli for helpful advice and discussion.

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  1. Center for Neural Science, 4 Washington Place, Room 809, New York University, New York, 10003, New York, USA

    Mehrdad Jazayeri & J Anthony Movshon

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Correspondence to J Anthony Movshon.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Jazayeri, M., Movshon, J. Optimal representation of sensory information by neural populations. Nat Neurosci 9, 690–696 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1691

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