ACh, Uncertainty, and Cortical Inference
Peter Dayan & Angela Yu
NIPS 2001, to appear
Abstract
Acetylcholine (ACh) has been implicated in a wide variety of tasks
involving attentional processes and plasticity. Following extensive
animal studies, it has previously been suggested that ACh reports on
uncertainty and controls hippocampal, cortical and
cortico-amygdalar plasticity. We extend this view and consider its
effects on cortical representational inference, arguing that ACh
controls the balance between bottom-up inference,
influenced by the input stimuli, and top-down inference,
influenced by contextual information. We illustrate our proposal using a
hierarchical hidden Markov model.
compressed postscript
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