With the advent of sophisticated acquisition and analysis techniques, decoding the contents of someone's experience has become a reality. We propose a straightforward linear Gaussian approach, where decoding relies on the inversion of properly regularized encoding models, which can still be solved analytically. In order to test our approach we acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging data under a rapid event-related design in which subjects were presented with handwritten characters. Our approach is shown to yield state-of-the-art reconstructions of perceived characters as estimated from BOLD responses. This even holds for previously unseen characters. We propose that this framework serves as a baseline with which to compare more sophisticated models for which analytical inversion is infeasible.
▪ It has long been assumed that sensory neurons are adapted, through both evolutionary and developmental processes, to the statistical properties of the signals to which they are exposed. Attneave (1954), Barlow (1961) proposed that information theory could provide a link between environmental statistics and neural responses through the concept of coding efficiency. Recent developments in statistical modeling, along with powerful computational tools, have enabled researchers to study more sophisticated statistical models for visual images, to validate these models empirically against large sets of data, and to begin experimentally testing the efficient coding hypothesis for both individual neurons and populations of neurons.
This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to a crucial mistakes.