arXiv:2603.07275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent experimental studies indicate that visual cognition is accompanied by slowly propagating biophysical travelling waves in cortical tissue. Here we propose polarization waves as a coherent physical framework for visual cognition. We first compute the propagation of scalar potential fields generated by impressed ionic currents in the primary visual cortex using a telegraph-type model and extract the velocity of the moving potential ridge. By exploiting the linear convolution structure, we then demonstrate that the scalar potential field and the polarization wave, arising from slowly oscillating neuronal dipoles, propagate with identical velocities. Remarkably, this velocity coincides with the independently predicted propagation speed of the cognitively inferred modulated wave (~1.5 cm/s). Because ionic influx entering a single optic-nerve channel integrates signals from more than a hundred photoreceptors, the resulting polarization field necessarily spans a distribution of wave numbers. We show that amplitudes of such multi-k polarization waves undergo dispersive spreading in time, which possibly suppresses cross-channel interference in visual perception.

arXiv:2603.07369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, while another, based on Bayesian inference, predicts learning increases redundancy by distributing information across neurons. We tested these hypotheses by tracking population responses in macaque cortical area V4 as monkeys learned visual discrimination tasks. We found strong support for the Bayesian predictions: task learning increased redundancy in neural responses over weeks of training and within single trials. This redundancy did not reduce information but instead increased the information carried by individual neurons. These insights suggest sensory processing in the brain reflects a generative rather than discriminative inference process.