Ideal Observer Theory

Ideal observer models are applications of Bayesian statistical decision theory to problems of neural information transduction, transmission, and utilization. A basic motivation is that, because sensory inputs provide noisy or ambiguous information about states of the world, probabilistic methods are required to understand how reliable decisions can be made. Thus, the focus is first on modeling the information for a task, independent of the observer under study, and second on comparisons of that model with a test observer, such as a human or neuron. A key rationale for such comparisons is that the ideal observer can be used to normalize performance for task difficulty. An ideal observer can also provide a starting point for modeling perceptual performance.