Topic: Hierarchical inference

How the activity of sensory neurons supports perceptual decisions remains one of the central questions of systems neuroscience. Two primary frameworks guide the field’s thinking on this question. One framework, guided by ideas of information maximization, redundancy reduction, and efficient coding, focuses on the decision-related information represented by neural responses and how it is extracted from sensory populations. In another framework, based on the Bayesian brain hypothesis, sensory responses represent posterior beliefs about the outside world, which then guide decision-making. Interes