Related papers: Retinal adaptation and invariance to changes in hi…
Neural coding is a field of study that concerns how sensory information is represented in the brain by networks of neurons. The link between external stimulus and neural response can be studied from two parallel points of view. The first,…
We take the testing perspective to understand what the minimal discrimination time between two stimuli is for different types of rate coding neurons. Our main goal is to describe the testing abilities of two different encoding systems:…
Positive correlations in the activity of neurons are widely observed in the brain. Previous studies have shown these correlations to be detrimental to the fidelity of population codes or at best marginally favorable compared to independent…
We propose the design of an original scalable image coder/decoder that is inspired from the mammalians retina. Our coder accounts for the time-dependent and also nondeterministic behavior of the actual retina. The present work brings two…
Several theories of early sensory processing suggest that it whitens sensory stimuli. Here, we test three key predictions of the whitening theory using recordings from 152 ganglion cells in salamander retina responding to natural movies. We…
The manner in which groups of neurons represent events in the external world is fundamental to neuroscience. Here, we analyze the population code of the retina during naturalistic stimulation and show that the information conveyed by…
Neurons in early sensory areas rapidly adapt to changing sensory statistics, both by normalizing the variance of their individual responses and by reducing correlations between their responses. Together, these transformations may be viewed…
Cellular nuclei recognition serves as a fundamental and essential step in the workflow of digital pathology. However, with disparate source organs and staining procedures among histology image clusters, the scanned tiles inherently conform…
Many neurons in the visual cortex are orientation-selective, increase their firing rate with contrast and are modulated by attention. What is the cortical circuit that underlies these computations? We examine how synchrony can be modulated…
Cortical populations of neurons develop sparse representations adapted to the statistics of the environment. While existing synaptic plasticity models reproduce some of the observed receptive-field properties, a major obstacle is the…
Neural circuits are able to perform computations under very diverse conditions and requirements. The required computations impose clear constraints on their fine-tuning: a rapid and maximally informative response to stimuli in general…
The visual system is hierarchically organized to process visual information in successive stages. Neural representations vary drastically across the first stages of visual processing: at the output of the retina, ganglion cell receptive…
Animals learn to predict external contingencies from experience through a process of conditioning. A natural mechanism for conditioning is stimulus substitution, whereby the neuronal response to a stimulus with no prior behavioral…
A neuron transforms its input into output spikes, and this transformation is the basic unit of computation in the nervous system. The spiking response of the neuron to a complex, time-varying input can be predicted from the detailed…
Why do neurons encode information the way they do? Normative answers to this question model neural activity as the solution to an optimisation problem; for example, the celebrated efficient coding hypothesis frames neural activity as the…
We present a method to estimate Gibbs distributions with \textit{spatio-temporal} constraints on spike trains statistics. We apply this method to spike trains recorded from ganglion cells of the salamander retina, in response to natural…
Repeating spatiotemporal spike patterns exist and carry information. Here we investigated how a single spiking neuron can optimally respond to one given pattern (localist coding), or to either one of several patterns (distributed coding,…
Statistical whitening transformations play a fundamental role in many computational systems, and may also play an important role in biological sensory systems. Existing neural circuit models of adaptive whitening operate by modifying…
In many cases, the computation of a neural system can be reduced to a receptive field, or a set of linear filters, and a thresholding function, or gain curve, which determines the firing probability; this is known as a linear/nonlinear…
Studies of human decision-making demonstrate that environmental regularities, such as natural image statistics or intentionally nonuniform stimulus probabilities, can be exploited to improve efficiency (termed `efficient-coding').…