Everyday decisions – from crossing a street to recognising a face – depend not only on what we perceive, but also on how confident we are in that perception.
While scientists know the brain is good at dealing with uncertainty, it has been unclear how individual brain cells reflect this uncertainty.
A new study now offers new insights to this question. A team of researchers from Switzerland and the Netherlands found that neurons become more stable when sensory information is more reliable. This work was supported by the Human Brain Project, and the results were published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The researchers analysed neural activity in a brain region of the mice during a task that required them to detect changes in visual and sound signals. They focused on the posterior parietal cortex, an area involved in decision-making.
Recent studies had already predicted that the brain weighs information according to how uncertain it is, much like statistical reasoning. However, testing this prediction on experimental data would be extremely challenging and require measuring the electrical state of a large number of neurons. Instead, the researchers used computational inference methods to estimate the signals from the neurons’ spiking activity.
The results show that when sensory information is clearer and more reliable, the variability of membrane potential (the electrical state of a neuron) is reduced. This effect was strongest when the sensory information was easier to interpret.
Understanding how single neurons reflect uncertainty may help explain how the brain makes decisions in noisy environments, and could inform future research on perception and learning.
All data from the study are openly available on EBRAINS at https://doi.org/10.25493/Q8R8-24V.
Read the paper:
Increased Perceptual Reliability Reduces Membrane Potential Variability in Cortical Neurons
von Hünerbein, B., Jordan, J., Oude Lohuis, M., Marchesi, P., Olcese, U., Pennartz, C. M. A., Senn, W., & Petrovici, M. A. (2026). The Journal of Neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 46(1), e1176242025. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1176-24.2025
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