@article {69802, title = {A theory of rapid behavioral inferences under the pressure of time}, journal = {bioRxiv}, year = {2025}, month = {2025 Mar 03}, abstract = {

To survive, animals must be able quickly infer the state of their surroundings. For example, to successfully escape an approaching predator, prey must quickly estimate the direction of approach from incoming sensory stimuli and guide their behavior accordingly. Such rapid inferences are particularly challenging because the animal has only a brief window of time to gather sensory stimuli, and yet the accuracy of inference is critical for survival. Due to evolutionary pressures, nervous systems have likely evolved effective computational strategies that enable accurate inferences under strong time limitations. Traditionally, the relationship between the speed and accuracy of inference has been described by the {\textquotedblleft}speed-accuracy tradeoff{\textquotedblright} (SAT), which quantifies how the average performance of an ideal observer improves as the observer has more time to collect incoming stimuli. While this trial-averaged description can reasonably account for individual inferences made over long timescales, it does not capture individual inferences on short timescales, when trial-to-trial variability gives rise to diverse patterns of error dynamics. We show that an ideal observer can exploit this single-trial structure by adaptively tracking the dynamics of its belief about the state of the environment, which enables it to speed its own inferences and more reliably track its own error, but also causes it to violate the SAT. We show that these features can be used to improve overall performance during rapid escape. The resulting behavior qualitatively reproduces features of escape behavior in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, whose escapes have presumably been highly optimized by natural selection.

}, doi = {10.1101/2024.08.26.609738}, url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2025/03/03/2024.08.26.609738}, author = {Hermundstad, Ann M. and M{\l}ynarski, Wiktor F.} } @article {67275, title = {Efficient and adaptive sensory codes.}, journal = {Nature Neuroscience}, volume = {24}, year = {2021}, month = {2021 Jul 01}, pages = {998-1009}, abstract = {

The ability to adapt to changes in stimulus statistics is a hallmark of sensory systems. Here, we developed a theoretical framework that can account for the dynamics of adaptation from an information processing perspective. We use this framework to optimize and analyze adaptive sensory codes, and we show that codes optimized for stationary environments can suffer from prolonged periods of poor performance when the environment changes. To mitigate the adversarial effects of these environmental changes, sensory systems must navigate tradeoffs between the ability to accurately encode incoming stimuli and the ability to rapidly detect and adapt to changes in the distribution of these stimuli. We derive families of codes that balance these objectives, and we demonstrate their close match to experimentally observed neural dynamics during mean and variance adaptation. Our results provide a unifying perspective on adaptation across a range of sensory systems, environments, and sensory tasks.

}, issn = {1097-6256}, doi = {10.1038/s41593-021-00846-0}, url = {http://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-021-00846-0}, author = {M{\l}ynarski, Wiktor F. and Hermundstad, Ann M.} }