[lingtalks] Wei Ji Ma talk, Tuesday Jan. 22nd 2pm

[Steven Ford]

The UCSD Department of Cognitive Science is pleased to announce a talk by

Wei Ji Ma Ph.D.

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
University of Rochester

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 2pm
Cognitive Science Building, room 003


"The neural basis of probabilistic computation in perception."

Perception often requires the combination of multiple pieces of uncertain 
information across sensory modalities (e.g. speech recognition), time (e.g. 
decision-making), or space (e.g. visual search, change detection). For many 
such tasks, human behavior has been shown to approach statistical 
optimality. This raises the question how optimal computation is implemented 
in biologically realistic neural networks. Using the framework of 
population coding, I will show that optimal cue integration – a common 
aspect of multisensory perception – is realized through linear operations 
on patterns of activity, provided that neural variability belongs to a 
broad family of distributions which we call Poisson-like. This suggests 
that the form of neural variability plays a crucial role in facilitating 
optimal computation. I will discuss predictions for physiological 
experiments. I will then outline a research program which aims to 
understand human behavior in and neural implementation of a wide variety of 
probabilistic computations, as well as deviations from optimality.
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