Related papers: Sparse incomplete representations: A novel role fo…
Sensory processing is hard because the variables of interest are encoded in spike trains in a relatively complex way. A major goal in sensory processing is to understand how the brain extracts those variables. Here we revisit a common…
We present a model of an olfactory system that performs odor segmentation. Based on the anatomy and physiology of natural olfactory systems, it consists of a pair of coupled modules, bulb and cortex. The bulb encodes the odor inputs as…
The olfactory system removes correlations in natural odors using a network of inhibitory neurons in the olfactory bulb. It has been proposed that this network integrates the response from all olfactory receptors and inhibits them equally.…
Mitral cells, the principal neurons in the olfactory bulb, respond to odorants by firing bursts of action potentials called sharp events. A given cell produces a sharp event at a fixed phase during the sniff cycle in response to a given…
We present a model of a coupled system of the olfactory bulb and cortex. Odor inputs to the epithelium are transformed to oscillatory bulbar activities. The cortex recognizes the odor by resonating to the bulbar oscillating pattern when the…
The reshaping and decorrelation of similar activity patterns by neuronal networks can enhance their discriminability, storage, and retrieval. How can such networks learn to decorrelate new complex patterns, as they arise in the olfactory…
In the olfactory system, odor percepts retain their identity despite substantial variations in concentration, timing, and background. We propose a novel strategy for encoding intensity-invariant stimuli identity that is based on…
The olfactory sense measures the chemical composition of the environment using a diverse array of olfactory receptors. In vertebrates, the olfactory receptors reside in a mucus layer in the nasal cavity and can thus only detect odorants…
The mechanism by which odorants are recognized by olfactory receptors remains primarily unresolved. While charge transport is believed to play a significant role, its precise nature is still unclear. Here, we present a novel perspective by…
Most neurons in peripheral sensory pathways initially respond vigorously when a preferred stimulus is presented, but adapt as stimulation continues. It is unclear how this phenomenon affects stimulus representation in the later stages of…
We present a model for olfactory coding based on spatial representation of glomerular responses. In this model distinct odorants activate specific subsets of glomeruli, dependent upon the odorant's chemical identity and concentration. The…
Animals smelling in the real world use a small number of receptors to sense a vast number of natural molecular mixtures, and proceed to learn arbitrary associations between odors and valences. Here, we propose a new interpretation of how…
In the principal cells of the insect mushroom body, the Kenyon cells (KC), olfactory information is represented by a spatially and temporally sparse code. Each odor stimulus will activate only a small portion of neurons and each stimulus…
Recordings from neurons in the insects' olfactory primary processing center, the antennal lobe (AL), reveal that the AL is able to process the input from chemical receptors into distinct neural activity patterns, called olfactory neural…
We introduce and study an artificial neural network, inspired by the probabilistic Receptor Affinity Distribution model of olfaction. Our system consists on N sensory neurons whose outputs converge on a single processing linear threshold…
The entorhinal-hippocampal circuit plays a critical role in higher brain functions, especially spatial cognition. Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) periodically fire with different grid spacing and orientation, which makes a…
Distributional models are derived from co-occurrences in a corpus, where only a small proportion of all possible plausible co-occurrences will be observed. This results in a very sparse vector space, requiring a mechanism for inferring…
The insect olfactory system, which includes the antennal lobe (AL), mushroom body (MB), and ancillary structures, is a relatively simple neural system capable of learning. Its structural features, which are widespread in biological neural…
Olfactory receptor usage is highly heterogeneous, with some receptor types being orders of magnitude more abundant than others. We propose an explanation for this striking fact: the receptor distribution is tuned to maximally represent…
A common view of sensory processing is as probabilistic inference of latent causes from receptor activations. Standard approaches often assume these causes are a priori independent, yet real-world generative factors are typically…