The Uncertain Brain: Untangling Ambiguity in Neural Circuits

“Every day humans and animals face ambiguous circumstances. If we become sick after eating, we blame the food; however, if we then fall ill without having eaten that food, the causal link becomes ambiguous. New research findings reveal where and how such ambiguous associations are processed in the brains of rats.”

“Tamas Madarasz, the lead author of the study now based at the University of Geneva, explained: “To make successful predictions the brain needs to consider different models of what these configurations could be, and perform computations in parallel using each of the possible models of the environment and the associated uncertainty. This leads to a distributed neural representation for each association. This approach has helped inspire better learning algorithms for computers, and it looks like animals are using this strategy too.” The authors suggest that humans may also evaluate their environment and its events using a statistical approach that computes the probabilities of associations to estimate ambiguity.”

Read the full article: The uncertain brain: Untangling ambiguity in neural circuits