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A Bayesian approach can contribute to an understanding of the brain on multiple levels, by giving normative predictions about how an ideal sensory system should combine prior knowledge and observation, by providing mechanistic interpretation of the dynamic functioning of the brain circuit, and by suggesting optimal ways of deciphering experimental data. This book brings together contributions from both experimental and theoretical neuroscientists that examine the brain mechanisms of perception, decision making, and motor control according to the concepts of Bayesian estimation. After an overview of the mathematical concepts, including Bayes theorem, that are basic to understanding the approaches discussed, contributors discuss how Bayesian concepts can be used for interpretation of such neurobiological data as neural spikes and functional brain imaging. Next, they examine the modeling of sensory processing, including the neural coding of information about the outside world, and finally, they explore dynamic processes for proper behaviors, including the mathematics of the speed and accuracy of perceptual decisions and neural models of belief propagation.

Dyslexia research has made dramatic progress since the mid-1980s. Once discounted as a “middle-class myth,” dyslexia is now the subject of a complex—and confusing—body of theoretical and empirical research. This book provides a uniquely broad and coherent analysis of dyslexia theory. Unlike most dyslexia research, which addresses the question “what is the cause of the reading disability called dyslexia?” the work presented here addressed the deeper question of “what is the cause of the learning disability that manifests as reading problems?” This perspective allows the text to place dyslexia research within the much broader disciplines of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience and has led to a rich framework, including two established leading theories, the automatization deficit account (1990) and the cerebellar deficit hypothesis (2001). The chapters in this book show that extensive evidence has accumulated to support these two theories and that they may be seen as subsuming the established phonological deficit account and sensory processing accounts. Moving to the explanatory level of neural systems, they argue that all these disorders reflect problems in some component of the procedural learning system, a multi-region system including major components of cortical and subcortical regions. The authors’ answer to the fundamental question “what is dyslexia?” offers a challenge and motivation for research throughout the learning disabilities, laying the foundations for future progress.