Neuroscience

Hierarchical priors enable neural prediction of perceived biological motion

1. Ingmar EJ de Vries
2. Floris P de Lange
3. Moritz F Wurm

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  In this valuable study, de Vries and colleagues aim to determine how the perception of biological motion is organized at the neural level, specifically testing whether this process rests on hierarchical predictive processing by extending a methodological framework that the authors previously published. The evidence is solid for the empirical claim that neural representations of body motion systematically lead the stimulus in time, with simulations validating the regression approach and consistent effects on both peak magnitude and peak latency. Support for the stronger theoretical interpretation that these signatures specifically reflect active hierarchical predictive inference requires further substantiation, since the design and analysis do not distinguish such inference from cached associative retrieval or from nonlinear temporal integration of slowly varying features.

Reviewed by eLife