Distributional Population Codes and Multiple Motion Models

Zemel, RS; Dayan, P

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Distributional Population Codes and Multiple Motion Models

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https://papers.nips.cc/paper/1556-distributional-population-codes-and-multiple-motion-models.pdf
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Zemel, R., & Dayan, P. (1999). Distributional Population Codes and Multiple Motion Models. In M. Kearns, S. Solla, & D. Cohn (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 11 (pp. 174-180). Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0002-DD97-B

Abstract

Theoretical and empirical studies of population codes make the assumption that neuronal activities reflect a unique and unambiguous value of an encoded quantity. However, population activities can contain additional information, such as multiple values of the quantity and uncertainty about it. We have previously suggested a method to recover the extra information by treating the activities of the population of cells as coding for a complete distribution over the coded quantity rather than just a single value. We now show how this approach bears on psychophysical and neurophysiological studies of population codes for motion direction. Our model is consistent with both correct and erroneous human performance on tasks in which subjects must report the directions of motion in stimuli containing groups of dots moving in some small number of directions. The model also suggests a natural explanation for why a monkey's psychophysical discrimination performance is not substantially better.