OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Neural circuits continuously integrate noisy sensory stimuli with predictions that often do not perfectly match, requiring the brain to combine these conflicting feedforward and feedback inputs according to their uncertainties. However, how the brain tracks both stimulus and prediction uncertainty remains unclear. Here, we show that a hierarchical prediction-error network can estimate both the sensory and prediction uncertainty with positive and negative prediction-error neurons. Consistent with prior hypotheses, we demonstrate that neural circuits rely more on predictions when sensory inputs are noisy and the environment is stable. By perturbing inhibitory interneurons within the prediction-error circuit, we reveal their role in uncertainty estimation and input weighting. Finally, we link our model to biased perception, showing how stimulus and prediction uncertainty contribute to the contraction bias.