Related papers: Cellular Adaptation Accounts for the Sparse and Re…
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…
Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…
We consider the information transmission problem in neurons and its possible implications for learning in neural networks. Our approach is based on recent developments in statistical physics and complexity science. Combining sensory…
Our knowledge of the sensory world is encoded by neurons in sequences of discrete, identical pulses termed action potentials or spikes. There is persistent controversy about the extent to which the precise timing of these spikes is relevant…
Most neurons in the primary visual cortex initially respond vigorously when a preferred stimulus is presented, but adapt as stimulation continues. The functional consequences of adaptation are unclear. Typically a reduction of firing rate…
Models of neural responses to stimuli with complex spatiotemporal correlation structure often assume that neurons are only selective for a small number of linear projections of a potentially high-dimensional input. Here we explore recent…
Many systems are modulated by unknown slow processes. This hinders analysis in highly non-linear systems, such as excitable systems. We show that for such systems, if the input matches the sparse `spiky' nature of the output, the spiking…
Sensory neuroscience seeks to understand how the brain encodes natural environments. However, neural coding has largely been studied using simplified stimuli. In order to assess whether the brain's coding strategy depend on the stimulus…
Traveling waves of neural activity emerge in cortical networks both spontaneously and in response to stimuli. The spatiotemporal structure of waves can indicate the information they encode and the physiological processes that sustain them.…
The adaptive fitness of an organism in its ecological niche is highly reliant upon its ability to associate an environmental or internal stimulus with a behavior response through reinforcement. This simple but powerful observation has been…
How natural communication sounds are spatially represented across the inferior colliculus, the main center of convergence for auditory information in the midbrain, is not known. The neural representation of the acoustic stimuli results from…
The computation performed by a neuron can be formulated as a combination of dimensional reduction in stimulus space and the nonlinearity inherent in a spiking output. White noise stimulus and reverse correlation (the spike-triggered average…
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…
Experimental data suggest that some classes of spiking neurons in the first layers of sensory systems are electrically coupled via gap junctions or ephaptic interactions. When the electrical coupling is removed, the response function…
Brains adapt to the statistical structure of their input. In the visual system, local light intensities change rapidly, the variance of the intensity changes more slowly, and the dynamic range of contrast itself changes more slowly still.…
Neural responses are highly variable, and some portion of this variability arises from fluctuations in modulatory factors that alter their gain, such as adaptation, attention, arousal, expected or actual reward, emotion, and local metabolic…
Spike generation in neurons produces a temporal point process, whose statistics is governed by intrinsic phenomena and the external incoming inputs to be coded. In particular, spike-evoked adaptation currents support a slow temporal process…
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 show that the unavoidable increase in neuronal response latency to ongoing stimulation serves as a nonuniform gradual stretching of neuronal circuit delay loops and emerges as an essential mechanism in the formation of various types of…
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…