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SUMMARY:Computational Neuroscience Journal Club - Ian Howard (University o
 f Cambridge)
DTSTART:20091201T160000Z
DTEND:20091201T170000Z
UID:TALK21767@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Jean-Pascal Pfister
DESCRIPTION:Ian Howard will talk about\n\nCausal inference in multisensory
  perception. Körding KP\, Beierholm U\, Ma WJ\, Quartz S\, Tenenbaum JB\,
  Shams L. PLoS One. 2007 Sep 26\;2(9)\n\nhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/a
 rticles/PMC1978520/\n\nAbstract:\n\nPerceptual events derive their signifi
 cance to an animal from their meaning about the world\, that is from the i
 nformation they carry about their causes. The brain should thus be able to
  efficiently infer the causes underlying our sensory events. Here we use m
 ultisensory cue combination to study causal inference in perception. We fo
 rmulate an ideal-observer model that infers whether two sensory cues origi
 nate from the same location and that also estimates their location(s). Thi
 s model accurately predicts the nonlinear integration of cues by human sub
 jects in two auditory-visual localization tasks. The results show that ind
 eed humans can efficiently infer the causal structure as well as the locat
 ion of causes. By combining insights from the study of causal inference wi
 th the ideal-observer approach to sensory cue combination\, we show that t
 he capacity to infer causal structure is not limited to conscious\, high-l
 evel cognition\; it is also performed continually and effortlessly in perc
 eption.\n
LOCATION:Cambridge University Engineering Department\, CBL Rm #438 (http:/
 /learning.eng.cam.ac.uk/Public/Directions)
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