Related papers: Heterogeneity and dynamics of cortical populations…
Neuronal heterogeneity, characterized by the presence of a multitude of spiking neuronal patterns, is a widespread phenomenon throughout the nervous system. In particular, the brain exhibits strong variability among inhibitory neurons.…
Neural population responses in sensory systems are driven by external physical stimuli. This stimulus-response relationship is typically characterized by receptive fields, which have been estimated by neural system identification…
Visual attention forms the basis of understanding the visual world. In this work we follow a computational approach to investigate the biological basis of visual attention. We analyze retinal and cortical electrophysiological data from…
The neural activity in the visual processing is influenced by both external stimuli and internal brain states. Ideally, a neural predictive model should account for both of them. Currently, there are no dynamic encoding models that…
Experiments that study neural encoding of stimuli at the level of individual neurons typically choose a small set of features present in the world --- contrast and luminance for vision, pitch and intensity for sound --- and assemble a…
Emerging evidence shows that the modular organization of the human brain allows for better and efficient cognitive performance. Many of these cognitive functions are very fast and occur in subsecond time scale such as the visual object…
Numerous studies have shown that neuronal responses are modulated by stimulus properties, and also by the state of the local network. However, little is known about how activity fluctuations of neuronal populations modulate the sensory…
Recent experimental and theoretical work on neural populations belonging to two separate early sensory systems, olfaction and vision, has challenged the notion that the two operate under different computational paradigms by providing…
We model sensory streams as observations from high-dimensional stochastic dynamical systems and conceptualize sensory neurons as self-supervised learners of compact representations of such dynamics. From prior experience, neurons learn…
The process through which humans perceive and learn visual representations in dynamic environments is highly complex. From a structural perspective, the human eye decouples the functions of cone and rod cells: cones are primarily…
Diversity conveys advantages in nature, yet homogeneous neurons typically comprise the layers of artificial neural networks. Here we construct neural networks from neurons that learn their own activation functions, quickly diversify, and…
Visual recognition takes a small fraction of a second and relies on the cascade of signals along the ventral visual stream. Given the rapid path through multiple processing steps between photoreceptors and higher visual areas, information…
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…
During development, the mammalian brain differentiates into specialized regions with distinct functional abilities. While many factors contribute to functional specialization, we explore the effect of neuronal density on the development of…
In studies of the visual system as well as in computer vision, the focus is often on contrast edges. However, the primate visual system contains a large number of cells that are insensitive to spatial contrast and, instead, respond to…
Brain decoding involves the determination of a subject's cognitive state or an associated stimulus from functional neuroimaging data measuring brain activity. In this setting the cognitive state is typically characterized by an element of a…
Maintaining upright posture is a complex task governed by the integration of afferent sensorimotor and visual information with compensatory neuromuscular reactions. The objective of this work was to characterize the visual dependency and…
Nowadays, it is possible to record the activity of hundreds of cells at the same time in behaving animals. However, these data are often treated and analyzed as if they consisted of many independently recorded neurons. How can neuronal…
Recent advances in techniques for monitoring and perturbing neural populations have greatly enhanced our ability to study circuits in the brain. In particular, two-photon holographic optogenetics now enables precise photostimulation of…
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…