This is a proposal to support a biennial international meeting on the topic of Sensory Coding and the Natural Environment. The theme of the meeting is highly interdisciplinary, drawing upon expertise in systems and cognitive neuroscience, perceptual psychology, statistics, signal processing, and computer science.
The aim i s to model and understand sensory processes in relation to the statistical structure of the natural environment. This approach is broadly applicable to any sensory modality of any organism. A number of studies over the past decade have shown that the statistical structure of the natural world is complex, but rather similar across environments and sensory modalities. Furthermore, sensory coding strategies of many animals are often well-adapted to their natural sensory environment, especially in the visual and auditory domains. Characterizing natural scene statistics and the complex, adaptive neural responses they elicit is thought to have great potential for shedding light on neural information processing strategies, as well as advancing the development of neural prostheses capable of transforming natural sound and images into a format interpretable by the brain. More importantly, there is a need to educate both students and current investigators about the techniques, methodologies, and types of results emerging from this field. Five previous meetings have been held on this topic, in 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. Starting in 2002, the meetings have been held as Gordon Research Conferences. Funding from this conference grant will enable us to invite experts in the field to a biennial Gordon Research Conference, as well as to provide conference fees and/or travel costs to young scientists, students and -postdocs interested in attending the meeting and learning about the field. This grant will partially fund a biennial international meeting on Sensory Coding and the Natural Environment, which will bring together a group of researchers, students, and postdocs from across scientific disciplines and from across sensory modalities to learn about the statistical structure of the natural world and how sensory systems are adapted to process these signals. Characterizing the complex neural responses evoked by naturalistic stimuli is essential for advancing the development of prostheses capable of transforming natural sound and images into a format interpretable by the brain. The meeting fulfills a key niche between large neuroscience meetings with sessions divided according to brain region and computational meetings that do not focus strongly on the natural environment, and the small format provides excellent opportunities for students and researchers to be exposed to unanticipated insights and forge new collaborations. ? ? ? ?
