Standard Research Grant: Representation and Inference in the Brain

The goal of this three-year project is to develop useful and precise definitions of ‘representation’ and ‘inference’ for attribution to the brain. Representation and inference are central notions in neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy, but there is no widely accepted definitions of these terms, and each of these fields would benefit from definitions in terms of neural activity. For example, neuroscientists often describe neural activity as representing and inferring. It is their way of describing the overall function of that activity, an abstraction away from detailed neural recordings. But, because there are no settled definitions, there are no objective grounds for these descriptions. As a result, they are treated as casual glosses rather than as rigorous analyses. Just as proper definitions accelerated progress in other fields, proper definitions of ‘representation’ and ‘inference’ have the potential to accelerate progress in neuroscience. This project will describe the challenge of defining ‘representation’ and ‘inference’ in terms of neural activity, survey potential definitions, and develop new definitions of these terms that link them to specific kinds of learning, each with identifiable neural correlates. It will then be shown how to attribute specific representations and inferences to the brain. The results of this project will contribute substantially to the philosophical foundations of neuroscience and cognitive science, and thereby serve to advance these fields. They will also be used in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses, and they will be published open source. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.