Topic: perceptual discrimination

The cholinergic system has been associated with learning, but also with cognitive decline in dementia, aging and injury. Yet, to date, no computational models have been put forward to explain how the cholinergic system contributes to both learning and cognitive decline. Here we introduce a model that combines a recently proposed model of cortex-wide credit assignment with a cholinergic adaptive module based on adaptive deep learning rules. According to this model, the cholinergic system opens a cortex-wide gate for learning, but its end effect is controlled by local adaptive processes. Using a

What we expect to see can greatly affect what we perceive. How does expectation influence local circuitry among visual cortical neurons to allow for perceptual discrimination in the context of rich natural inputs? Little work has sought to understand how populations of sensory cortical neurons change their responses with expectation, and the majority of studies manipulate expectation in a task-irrelevant way, disallowing for comparisons of changes in neural activity with behavioral performance. Theoretical and experimental work indicates that changes at the population level, in particular thos