Probabilistic Inference and the Brain

This symposium was held at Collège de France, in partnership with EITN (European Institute for Theoretical Neuroscience), on September 10 and 11, 2015. Organized by Stanislas Dehaene, Professor at the Collège de France holding the Experimental Cognitive Psychology Chair, Alain Destexhe (CNRS, EITN), Wolgang Maass (University of Graz, Austria) and Florent Meyniel (CEA, France). The aim of the symposium was to bring together researchers from both theoretical and experimental backgrounds to gain a better understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in probabilistic inference. The presentations reviewed the main theoretical models for the neural implementation of probabilistic inference mechanisms, and the data currently available to characterize them. The joint presentation of theoretical and experimental perspectives identified the critical data in experimental neuroscience for arbitrating between different theoretical models, distinguishing between existing data and data to be the subject of future research.