Natural
Stimulus Statistics 2000
22-25 October 2000
The Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
Organizer: Pamela Reinagel (Harvard Medical School)
Co-organizer: Simon Laughlin (University of Cambridge)
This
small workshop was held to discuss how biological sensory systems process
natural stimuli. Natural stimuli are
highly redundant or predictable. Therefore sensory systems could make use of
the statistics of natural stimuli to encode them efficiently. This workshop discussed: how to measure the
statistical structure of natural stimuli; the theory of how such signals could
be efficiently encoded; and tests of whether biological systems employ such
coding strategies (both neurophysiology and perceptual psychology). One theme of the workshop was the search for
principles that apply to sensory systems as such, across the boundaries of
species and sensory modality.
Special issue of Network: Computation in Neural Systems (Vol 12, Aug 2001).
preinagel {at} ucsd {dot} edu