The "eye basis" of this neurological account seems somewhat of a throwback. Hubert and Weisel won a 1981 Nobel for finding single ocular cells mapped to single neurons. This spawned a huge attempt to identify feature detection neurons, one per feature. This wasn't very successful; the field moved on to identify neural networks, complex patterns that emerge from different neural groups. Glimcher instead looks at mean firing rates, not patterns. It's interesting that those rates correlate with utility hypothesis, but in science magnitude is n... (read more)
The "eye basis" of this neurological account seems somewhat of a throwback. Hubert and Weisel won a 1981 Nobel for finding single ocular cells mapped to single neurons. This spawned a huge attempt to identify feature detection neurons, one per feature. This wasn't very successful; the field moved on to identify neural networks, complex patterns that emerge from different neural groups. Glimcher instead looks at mean firing rates, not patterns. It's interesting that those rates correlate with utility hypothesis, but in science magnitude is n... (read more)