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Abstract

Ever since Shannon's "Mathematical Theory of Communication" [40] first appeared, information theory has been of interest to psychologists and physiologists, to try to provide an explanation for the process of perception. Attneave [8] proposed that visual perception is the construction of an economical description of a scene from a very redundant initial representation. Barlow [9] suggested that lateral inhibition in the visual pathway may reduce the redundancy of an image, so information can be represented more eciently. More recently, Linsker with his `Infomax' principle [21, 22], Atick and Redlich [5, 6], and Plumbley and Fallside [30, 32] have continued with this approach with considerable success. There have also been important advances in data compression techniques associated with principal component analysis. The original work of Oja [23] has now been extended to the analysis of higher-order statistics by Taylor and Coombes [45], and these techniques are presently ...