Related papers: Heterogeneity and dynamics of cortical populations…

Recordings from area V4 of monkeys have revealed that when the focus of attention is on a visual stimulus within the receptive field of a cortical neuron, two distinct changes can occur: The firing rate of the neuron can change and there…

Neurons process sensory stimuli efficiently, showing sparse yet highly variable ensemble spiking activity involving structured higher-order interactions. Notably, while neural populations are mostly silent, they occasionally exhibit highly…

While recent advances in next-generation neural mass models provide exact descriptions of densely coupled neural populations in the thermodynamic limit, populations in vivo remain strictly finite in size. Finite-size effects introduce…

A major challenge in cognitive neuroscience is to evaluate the ability of the human brain to categorize or group visual stimuli based on common features. This categorization process is very fast and occurs in few hundreds of millisecond…

Decades of psychological research have been aimed at modeling how people learn features and categories. The empirical validation of these theories is often based on artificial stimuli with simple representations. Recently, deep neural…

Population analyses of functional connectivity have provided a rich understanding of how brain function differs across time, individual, and cognitive task. An important but challenging task in such population analyses is the identification…

Following a stimulus, the neural response typically strongly varies in time and across neurons before settling to a steady-state. While classical population coding theory disregards the temporal dimension, recent works have argued that…

Sequences of events in noise-driven excitable systems with slow variables often show serial correlations among their intervals of events. Here, we employ a master equation for general non-renewal processes to calculate the interval and…

Understanding how human brains interpret and process information is important. Here, we investigated the selectivity and inter-individual differences in human brain responses to images via functional MRI. In our first experiment, we found…

Neural representations of visual perception are affected by mental imagery and attention. Although attention is known to modulate neural representations, it is unknown how imagery changes neural representations when imagined and perceived…

Two prominent strategies that the human visual system uses to reduce incoming information are spatial integration and selective attention. Although spatial integration summarizes and combines information over the visual field, selective…

Neurons can display highly variable dynamics. While such variability presumably supports the wide range of behaviors generated by the organism, their gene expressions are relatively stable in the adult brain. This suggests that neuronal…

Neurons in the brain represent information in their collective activity. The fidelity of this neural population code depends on whether and how variability in the response of one neuron is shared with other neurons. Two decades of studies…

A rigorous understanding of brain dynamics and function requires a conceptual bridge between multiple levels of organization, including neural spiking and network-level population activity. Mounting evidence suggests that neural networks of…

We examine how the prior probability distribution of a sensory variable in the environment influences the optimal allocation of neurons and spikes in a population that represents that variable. We start with a conventional response model,…

Rapid categorization paradigms have a long history in experimental psychology: Characterized by short presentation times and speedy behavioral responses, these tasks highlight the efficiency with which our visual system processes natural…

Which statistical features of spiking activity matter for how stimuli are encoded in neural populations? A vast body of work has explored how firing rates in individual cells and correlations in the spikes of cell pairs impact coding. But…

It has been known for about a century that psychophysical response curves (perception of a given physical stimulus vs. stimulus intensity) have a large dynamic range: many decades of stimulus intensity can be appropriately discriminated…

The primary visual cortex processes a large amount of visual information, however, due to its large receptive fields, when multiple stimuli fall within one receptive field, there are computational problems. To solve this problem, the visual…

Value guides behavior. With knowledge of stimulus values and action consequences, behaviors that maximize expected reward can be selected. Prior work has identified several brain structures critical for representing both stimuli and their…