Department of Psychiatry, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Berlin Institute of Health, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Max Delbrück Center, Berlin, Germany.
PLoS Biol. 2023 Dec 8;21(12):e3002410. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002410. eCollection 2023 Dec.
Perception is known to cycle through periods of enhanced and reduced sensitivity to external information. Here, we asked whether such slow fluctuations arise as a noise-related epiphenomenon of limited processing capacity or, alternatively, represent a structured mechanism of perceptual inference. Using 2 large-scale datasets, we found that humans and mice alternate between externally and internally oriented modes of sensory analysis. During external mode, perception aligns more closely with the external sensory information, whereas internal mode is characterized by enhanced biases toward perceptual history. Computational modeling indicated that dynamic changes in mode are enabled by 2 interlinked factors: (i) the integration of subsequent inputs over time and (ii) slow antiphase oscillations in the impact of external sensory information versus internal predictions that are provided by perceptual history. We propose that between-mode fluctuations generate unambiguous error signals that enable optimal inference in volatile environments.
感知被认为会在对外界信息的敏感和不敏感之间循环。在这里，我们想知道这种缓慢的波动是作为有限处理能力的相关噪声现象出现的，还是代表了一种有组织的感知推理机制。我们使用了两个大规模数据集，发现人和老鼠在外部和内部感官分析模式之间交替。在外部模式下，感知与外部感官信息更加一致，而内部模式的特点是对感知历史的偏好增强。计算模型表明，模式的动态变化是由两个相互关联的因素实现的：（i）随着时间的推移对后续输入的整合，以及（ii）外部感官信息与由感知历史提供的内部预测之间的缓慢反相振荡。我们提出，模式之间的波动产生了明确的错误信号，使在不稳定的环境中进行最佳推理成为可能。
