26th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS*2017): Part 1

Perception seems so simple.I look out of the window to see houses, trees, people walking past, the sky above, the grass below.I hear birds in the trees, cars going past, the distant sound of an alarm.The world is full of objects that make their presence known to me through my senses -what could be more simple?Yet the efficacy of perceptual experience hides a host of questions for which we do not yet have the answers.Information reaching our senses is generally incomplete, ambiguous, distributed in space and time and not neatly sorted according to its source, so a key function of our perceptual systems is to discover the likely causes of our sensations.Perception as inference or hypothesis testing, formalised in the predictive coding theory, offers an attractive framework for exploring these issues.From this perspective, regularities or patterns provide perceptual systems with some traction, allowing the formation of expectations and a basis for decomposing the world into discrete objects.But in the dynamic world which we inhabit, object representations must be similarly dynamic, and need to form and dissolve, dominate and yield, in a way that facilitates veridical perception.In this talk I will discuss auditory scene analysis in the context of predictive coding using experimental data, exemplar models, and the phenomenon of perceptual multistability.