ACh, Uncertainty, and Cortical Inference

Acetylcholine (ACh) has been implicated in a wide variety of tasks involving attentional processes and plasticity. Following extensive animal studies, it has previously been suggested that ACh reports on uncertainty and controls hippocampal, cortical and cortico-amygdalar plasticity. We extend this view and consider its effects on cortical representational inference, arguing that ACh controls the balance between bottom-up inference, influenced by input stimuli, and top-down inference, influenced by contextual information. We illustrate our proposal using a hierarchical hidden Markov model.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: NIPS
• Authors: Peter Dayan, Angela J. Yu
• Keywords: Cortical Representational Inference, Extensive Animal Studies, Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model, NIPS 2001, NIPS 2007