Topic: somatosensory and visual areas

A major question in computational neuroscience is what computational strategies the brain employs to represent the external world, the internal states, and its decisions. An open debate is whether neurons are organized in specialized sub-populations to encode behaviorally relevant variables ("categorical" selectivity) or whether information on several variables is distributed across the neural population ("heterogeneous mixed" selectivity). With evidence being published in support of both views, it is unclear under which conditions the brain uses one or the other encoding strategy. We will p