Statistical models and sensory attention

Physiological investigations into the neural basis of sensory attention have led to puzzling and contradictory results. Attention can seemingly lead to increased, decreased and unchanged neural activities, according to features of attentional experiments that are not well understood. We take one particular case in which activities increase as a result of attention, model its possible statistical underpinning, and relate our model to other attentional suggestions. Increased activities in population codes are associated with increased certainty about the encoded quantities. This increased certainty has to come from somewhere; in our model it emerges from particular changes in the model's processing strategy.