Neural mechanisms of flexible perceptual inference.

ABSTRACT: What seems obvious in one context can take on an entirely different meaning if that context shifts. While context-dependent inference has been widely studied, a fundamental question remains: how does the brain simultaneously infer both the meaning of sensory input and the underlying context itself, especially when the context is changing? Here, we study flexible perceptual inference-the ability to adapt rapidly to implicit contextual shifts without trial and error. We introduce a novel change-detection task in dynamic environments that requires tracking latent state and context. We find that mice exhibit first-trial behavioral adaptation to latent context shifts driven by inference rather than reward feedback. By deriving the Bayes-optimal policy under a partially observable Markov decisio

SUBMITTER: Schwarcz J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12680366 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature