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Diverse perceptual biases emerge from Hebbian plasticity in a recurrent neural network model

Schönsberg, F.; Giana, D.; Chopra, Y.; Diamond, M. E.; Goldt, S.

2024-12-20 neuroscience
10.1101/2024.05.30.596641 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Perceptual biases offer a glimpse into how the brain processes sensory stimuli. While psycho-physics has uncovered systematic biases such as contraction (stored information shifts towards a central tendency), and repulsion (the current percept shifts away from recent percepts), a unifying neural network model for how such seemingly distinct biases emerge from learning is lacking. Here, we show that both contractive and repulsive biases emerge from continuous Hebbian plasticity in a single recurrent neural network. We test the model in four different datasets, two sensory modalities and three experimental paradigms: two working memory tasks, a reference memory task, and a novel "one-back task" that we designed to test the robustness of the model. We find excellent agreement between model predictions and experimental data without fine-tuning the model to any particular paradigm. These results show that apparently contradictory perceptual biases can in fact emerge from a simple local learning rule in a single recurrent region of the brain.

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