ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Bayesian inference in ring attractor networks.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- A deep reinforcement learning account of competition and integration of visual and goal vector signals for spatial navigation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Combining sampling and attractor dynamics in spiking models of head direction systems.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Modeling the journey as well as the destination: a control theory account of rotational navigation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Robust maintenance of both stimulus location and amplitude in a working memory model based on dendritic bistability.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Continuous attractor dynamics in spatial navigation: from population geometry to flexible computation.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Review
- Probabilistic working memory representations in human cortex guide behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cortex-Wide Substrates for Body Schema and Action Awareness.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Explicit error coding can mediate gain recalibration in continuous bump attractor networks.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Disinhibition of a recurrent attractor gates a persistent goal signal for navigation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Uncertainty estimation with prediction-error circuits.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Robustly encoding certainty in a metastable neural circuit model.Physical review. E · 2024Article
- Synaptic ring attractor: A unified framework for attractor dynamics and multiple cues integration.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Self-motion perception and sequential decision-making: where are we heading?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- A model of cue integration as vector summation in the insect brain.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Sensory fusion in the hoverfly righting reflex.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Working memories are thought to be held in attractor networks in the brain. These attractors should keep track of the uncertainty associated with each memory, so as to weigh it properly against conflicting new evidence. However, conventional attractors do not represent uncertainty. Here, we show how uncertainty could be incorporated into an attractor, specifically a ring attractor that encodes head direction. First, we introduce a rigorous normative framework (the circular Kalman filter) for benchmarking the performance of a ring attractor under conditions of uncertainty. Next, we show that the recurrent connections within a conventional ring attractor can be retuned to match this benchmark. This allows the amplitude of network activity to grow in response to confirmatory evidence, while shrinking in response to poor-quality or strongly conflicting evidence. This "Bayesian ring attractor" performs near-optimal angular path integration and evidence accumulation. Indeed, we show that a Bayesian ring attractor is consistently more accurate than a conventional ring attractor. Moreover, near-optimal performance can be achieved without exact tuning of the network connections. Finally, we use large-scale connectome data to show that the network can achieve near-optimal performance even after we incorporate biological constraints. Our work demonstrates how attractors can implement a dynamic Bayesian inference algorithm in a biologically plausible manner, and it makes testable predictions with direct relevance to the head direction system as well as any neural system that tracks direction, orientation, or periodic rhythms.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.