Topic: neural sampling hypothesis

A prominent theory of sensory perception advocates that perception in the brain is implemented via probabilistic inference. The neural sampling hypothesis (NSH) posits that neuronal responses to a stimulus represent samples from the posterior distribution over latent world state variables (e.g., object identity) that underlie the stimulus. Existing work on NSH commonly evaluates qualitative agreement of experimental data with simple generative models of the stimulus and does not fit NSH models to experimentally observed sensory population responses. We propose a novel formulation for NSH that