Graduate Center for Vision Research, State University of New York College of Optometry, New York, New York 10036, Brain and Mind Research Institute, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, New York 10021, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, and Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853.
J Neurosci. 2013 Nov 6;33(45):17597-602. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3343-13.2013.
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 show how the geometric structures of perceptual spaces can be determined experimentally and how these 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.
神经科学的一个核心目标是理解神经元群体如何构建和操纵感知表示，这些表示提供了有关环境的有用信息。本次研讨会探讨了这些表示的基本性质以及它们在其中组织的感知空间。涵盖颜色、视觉纹理、环境声音、音乐、触觉质量和气味等领域，我们展示了如何通过实验确定感知空间的几何结构，以及这些结构如何为神经编码原理以及生成这些编码的神经机制提供深入了解，并为复杂感官刺激的神经处理提供深入了解。这些不同感觉系统中的神经结构的多样性为比较它们对常见问题的不同解决方案提供了机会：需要降维、拓扑或非拓扑映射的策略、自然感觉刺激中固有高阶统计结构的实用性，以及神经硬件的限制。
