Topic: heuristic decoder

Neural activity in visual cortex is well described by models composed of a deterministic tuning function, a stochastic gain, and a point process. Recent work has shown that in the responses of neurons in the visual cortex of nonhuman primates, variability in the gain is tuned to the statistics of the sensory input. This suggests that gain variability may reflect signal rather than noise. Some theories of neural coding suggest that perceptual uncertainty may be encoded in neural response variability, and that, specifically, gain variability appears well suited to inform downstream uncertainty e