Related papers: Temporal sequences of spikes during practice code …
Studies of motor control have almost universally examined firing rates to investigate how the brain shapes behavior. In principle, however, neurons could encode information through the precise temporal patterning of their spike trains as…
A fundamental problem in neuroscience is to understand how sequences of action potentials ("spikes") encode information about sensory signals and motor outputs. Although traditional theories of neural coding assume that information is…
Complex, learned motor behaviors involve the coordination of large-scale neural activity across multiple brain regions, but our understanding of the population-level dynamics within different regions tied to the same behavior remains…
We demonstrate that the information contained in the spike occurrence times of a population of neurons can be broken up into a series of terms, each of which reflect something about potential coding mechanisms. This is possible in the…
In nature, animals encounter high dimensional sensory stimuli that have complex statistical and dynamical structure. Attempts to study the neural coding of these natural signals face challenges both in the selection of the signal ensemble…
Trial-and-error learning requires evaluating variable actions and reinforcing successful variants. In songbirds, vocal exploration is induced by LMAN, the output of a basal ganglia-circuit that also contributes a corrective bias to the…
The problem of deciphering how low-level patterns (action potentials in the brain, amino acids in a protein, etc.) drive high-level biological features (sensorimotor behavior, enzymatic function) represents the central challenge of…
The means by which neuronal activity yields robust behavior is a ubiquitous question in neuroscience. In the songbird, the timing of a highly stereotyped song motif is attributed to the cortical nucleus HVC, and to feedback to HVC from…
The timing of individual neuronal spikes is essential for biological brains to make fast responses to sensory stimuli. However, conventional artificial neural networks lack the intrinsic temporal coding ability present in biological…
Frequency discrimination is a fundamental task of the auditory system. The mammalian inner ear, or cochlea, provides a place code in which different frequencies are detected at different spatial locations. However, a temporal code based on…
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…
The problem of neural coding is to understand how sequences of action potentials (spikes) are related to sensory stimuli, motor outputs, or (ultimately) thoughts and intentions. One clear question is whether the same coding rules are used…
Behavioral sequences of animals are often structured and can be described by probabilistic rules (or "action syntax"). The patterns of vocal elements in birdsong are a prime example. The encoding of such rules in neural circuits is poorly…
Various classes of neurons alternate between high-frequency discharges and silent intervals. This phenomenon is called burst firing. To analyze burst activity in an insect system, grasshopper auditory receptor neurons were recorded in vivo…
Temporal coding is one approach to representing information in spiking neural networks. An example of its application is the location of sounds by barn owls that requires especially precise temporal coding. Dependent upon the azimuthal…
Although temporal coding through spike-time patterns has long been of interest in neuroscience, the specific structures that could be useful for spike-time codes remain highly unclear. Here, we introduce a new analytical approach, using…
Understanding a neural code requires knowledge both of the elementary symbols that transmit information and of the algorithm for translating these symbols into sensory signals or motor actions. We show that these questions can be separated:…
Over the brief time intervals available for processing retinal output, roughly 50 to 300 msec, the number of extra spikes generated by individual ganglion cells can be quite variable. Here, computer-generated spike trains were used to…
Populations of neurons display an extraordinary diversity in the behaviors they affect and display. Machine learning techniques have recently emerged that allow us to create networks of model neurons that display behaviours of similar…
In the last century, most sensorimotor studies of cortical neurons relied on average firing rates. Rate coding is efficient for fast sensorimotor processing that occurs within a few seconds. Much less is known about the neural mechanisms…