A common feature of many approaches to modeling sensory statistics is an emphasis on capturing the "average." From early representations in the brain, to highly abstracted class categories in machine learning for classification tasks, central-tendency models based on the Gaussian distribution are a seemingly natural and obvious choice for modeling sensory data. However, insights from neuroscience, psychology, and computer vision suggest an alternate strategy: preferentially focusing representational resources on the extremes of the distribution of sensory inputs. The notion of treating...
A common feature of many approaches to modeling sensory statistics is an emphasis on capturing the "average." From early representations in the brain,...
