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HISTORICAL NEWS & VIEWS: NEURAL CODING

Does predictive coding have a future?

Nature Neuroscience volume 21, pages 1019–1021 (2018)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 22 November 2018

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In the 20th century we thought the brain extracted knowledge from sensations. The 21st century witnessed a ‘strange inversion’, in which the brain became an organ of inference, actively constructing explanations for what’s going on ‘out there’, beyond its sensory epithelia. One paper played a key role in this paradigm shift.

Every decade or so, one reads a paper that makes you think “well, that’s quite remarkable”. In 1999, Rao and Ballard1 offered a treatment of visual processing as predictive coding. In their view, backward connections from higher to lower order visual areas try to predict activity in lower order areas, while the counter-stream of ascending, forward connections convey prediction errors, i.e., the ‘newsworthy’ information that cannot be predicted. These prediction errors drive expectations in higher levels toward better explanations for lower levels. Using simulations they showed that this simple (hierarchical) architecture was not only consistent with neuroanatomy and physiology but could also account for a range of subtle response properties such as ‘end-stopping’ among other extraclassical receptive field effects.

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Fig. 1: Hierarchical predictive coding: schematics that describe the hierarchical message passing implicit in predictive coding based on deep generative models.

Katie Vicari/Springer Nature

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  • 22 November 2018

    This News & Views article should have been marked as a Historical News & Views and the supertitle was incorrect.

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  1. The Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, London, UK

    Karl Friston

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Correspondence to Karl Friston.

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Friston, K. Does predictive coding have a future?. Nat Neurosci 21, 1019–1021 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0200-7

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