“Possible Principles Underlying the Transformations of Sensory Messages”, 1961 (; similar):
This chapter is an attempt to formulate ideas about the operations performed by physiological mechanisms, and not merely a discussion of the physiological mechanisms of sensory pathways. It presents 3 hypotheses regarding the purpose of sensory relays.
The first one is the “password” hypothesis, which posits that, since animals respond specifically to specific stimuli, their sensory pathways must possess mechanisms for detecting such stimuli and discriminating between them.
The second hypothesis is the fashionable one that relays act as control points at which the flow of information is modulated according to the requirements of other parts of the nervous system.
Finally, the third hypothesis theorizes that reduction of redundancy is an important principle guiding the organization of sensory messages and is carried out at relays in the sensory pathways.
[Keywords: physiological mechanisms, sensory pathways, sensory relays, password hypothesis, reduction of redundancy, sensory messages] [cf.: “Redundancy reduction revisited”, 2001; “Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction”, et al 2021; “VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning”, et al 2021; “DINO: Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers”, et al 2021; “DirectPred: Understanding self-supervised Learning Dynamics without Contrastive Pairs”, et al 2021 (blog); TWIST.]