Perceptual spaces: Mathematical structures to neural mechanisms

Qasim Zaidi, Jonathan Victor, Josh McDermott, Maria Geffen, Sliman Bensmaia, Thomas A. Cleland

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

23 Scopus citations

Abstract

A central goal of neuroscience is to understand how populations of neurons build and manipulate representations of percepts that provide useful information about the environment. This symposium explores the fundamental properties of these representations and the perceptual spaces in which they are organized. Spanning the domains of color, visual texture, environmental sound, music, tactile quality, and odor, we showhowthe geometric structures of perceptual spaces can be determined experimentally andhowthese structures provide insights into the principles of neural coding and the neural mechanisms that generate the codes, and into the neural processing of complex sensory stimuli. The diversity of the neural architecture in these different sensory systems provides an opportunity to compare their different solutions to common problems: the need for dimensionality reduction, strategies for topographic or nontopographic mapping, the utility of the higher-order statistical structure inherent in natural sensory stimuli, and the constraints of neural hardware.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)17597-17602
Number of pages6
JournalJournal of Neuroscience
Volume33
Issue number45
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Externally publishedYes

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