Not Noisy, Just Wrong: The Role of Suboptimal Inference in Behavioral Variability
Behavior varies from trial to trial even when the stimulus is maintained as constant as possible. In many models, this variability is attributed to noise in the brain. Here, we propose that there is another major source of variability: suboptimal inference. Importantly, we argue that in most tasks o...
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Published in | Neuron (Cambridge, Mass.) Vol. 74; no. 1; pp. 30 - 39 |
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Main Authors | , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Elsevier Inc
12.04.2012
Elsevier Limited |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Behavior varies from trial to trial even when the stimulus is maintained as constant as possible. In many models, this variability is attributed to noise in the brain. Here, we propose that there is another major source of variability: suboptimal inference. Importantly, we argue that in most tasks of interest, and particularly complex ones, suboptimal inference is likely to be the dominant component of behavioral variability. This perspective explains a variety of intriguing observations, including why variability appears to be larger on the sensory than on the motor side, and why our sensors are sometimes surprisingly unreliable.
Behavioral variability has often been attributed to noise in the brain. In this Perspective, Pouget and colleagues propose that there is another major source of variability, suboptimal inference, which is the dominant component of behavioral variability in complex tasks. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-2 ObjectType-Feature-1 These authors contributed equally to this work |
ISSN: | 0896-6273 1097-4199 |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.03.016 |