Seeing White: Qualia in the Context of Decoding Population Codes

When the nervous system is presented with multiple simultaneous inputs of some variable, such as wavelength or disparity, they can be combined to give rise to qualitatively new percepts that cannot be produced by any single input value. For example, there is no single wavelength that appears white. Many models of decoding neural population codes have problems handling multiple inputs, either attempting to extract a single value of the input parameter or, in some cases, registering the presence of multiple inputs without synthesizing them into something new. These examples raise a more general issue regarding the interpretation of population codes. We propose that population decoding involves not the extraction of specific values of the physical inputs, but rather a transformation from the input space to some abstract representational space that is not simply related to physical parameters. As a specific example, a four-layer network is presented that implements a transformation from wavelength to a high-level hue-saturation color space.