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Bio:
Research Focus:
Perception is an ill-posed problem. Many of the sights and sounds we perceive on a regular basis are ambiguous, yet we regularly identify objects consistently by sight from a variety of angles, in multiple contexts, and even when partially occluded or in poor lighting conditions. Because of this ambiguity, perception is necessarily an act of inference, as recognized by Helmholtz in the 19th century, which combines prior knowledge with data to produce estimates about characteristics of the physical world. The neural systems that govern perception must therefore encode this prior knowledge and provide a mechanism for incorporating data from low-level sensory systems. My research interests are in identifying and understanding the mechanisms and principles that the nervous system uses to perform the inferences which allow us to perceive the world. I am particularly interested in neural implementations of Bayesian inference and mechanisms by which prior knowledge is encoded as well as the implications that coding efficiency has on the structure of neural circuits. I also wish to understand how network structure relates to network activity and how that activity corresponds to the statistics of stimuli. An important component of this endeavor is understanding the characteristics of stimuli that perceptual systems evolved to efficiently interpret, how those characteristics are represented in cortex, and how (and to what extent) they can be decoded.
Expertise
Research Programs
eNeuro
Sep 01, 2023
Chase W. King, Peter Ledochowitsch, Michael A. Buice, Saskia E. J. de Vries
PLoS computational biology
Nov 01, 2018
Anton Arkhipov, Nathan W. Gouwens, Yazan N. Billeh, Sergey Gratiy, Ramakrishnan Iyer, Ziqiang Wei, Zihao Xu, Reza Abbasi-Asl, Jim Berg, Michael Buice, Nicholas Cain, Nuno da Costa, Saskia de Vries, Daniel Denman, Severine Durand, David Feng, Tim Jarsky, Jérôme Lecoq, Brian Lee, Lu Li, Stefan Mihalas, Gabriel K. Ocker, Shawn R. Olsen, R. Clay Reid, Gilberto Soler-Llavina, Staci A. Sorensen, Quanxin Wang, Jack Waters, Massimo Scanziani, Christof Koch
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Jul 05, 2016
Michael Hawrylycz, Costas Anastassiou, Anton Arkhipov, Jim Berg, Michael Buice, Nicholas Cain, Nathan W. Gouwens, Sergey Gratiy, Ramakrishnan Iyer, Jung Hoon Lee, Stefan Mihalas, Catalin Mitelut, Shawn Olsen, R. Clay Reid, Corinne Teeter, Saskia de Vries, Jack Waters, Hongkui Zeng, Christof Koch, MindScope
Oct 01, 2013
Ramakrishnan Iyer, Vilas Menon, Michael Buice, Christof Koch, Stefan Mihalas