Published on February 6, 2019 | Updated on April 11, 2019

CORTEX conference by Floris de Lange

February 22nd, 2019

How are priors and likelihood combined in the sensory brain?

Perception and perceptual decision-making are strongly facilitated by prior knowledge about the probabilistic structure of the world. While the computational benefits of using prior expectation in perception are clear, there are myriad ways in which this computation can be realized. In my talk, I will discuss recent observations from my lab into how this process may be neurally implemented. Specifically, I will: 1) provide evidence for the separation of priors and likelihood in different layers of the cortex; 2) examine the integration of priors and likelihood in the context of the word superiority effect; 3) show that attention mediates this balance by increasing, rather than reducing, the effect of priors.