Related papers: Heterogeneity and dynamics of cortical populations…
Neural population activity often exhibits rich variability and temporal structure. This variability is thought to arise from single-neuron stochasticity, neural dynamics on short time-scales, as well as from modulations of neural firing…
The brain is characterized by a strong heterogeneity of inhibitory neurons. We report that spiking neural networks display a resonance to the heterogeneity of inhibitory neurons, with optimal input/output responsiveness occurring for levels…
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,…
Cortical sensory neurons are known to be highly variable, in the sense that responses evoked by identical stimuli often change dramatically from trial to trial. The origin of this variability is uncertain, but it is usually interpreted as…
The human ability to recognize when an object belongs or does not belong to a particular vision task outperforms all open set recognition algorithms. Human perception as measured by the methods and procedures of visual psychophysics from…
The serotonergic system modulates brain processes via functionally distinct subpopulations of neurons with heterogeneous properties, including their electrophysiological activity. In extracellular recordings, serotonergic neurons to be…
Motivated by experimental observations, we investigate a variant of the cocktail party problem: the detection of a weak periodic stimulus in the presence of fluctuations and another periodic stimulus which is stronger than the periodic…
As few real systems comprise indistinguishable units, diversity is a hallmark of nature. Diversity among interacting units shapes properties of collective behavior such as synchronization and information transmission. However, the benefits…
The brain is organized in a modular way, serving multiple functionalities. This multiplicity requires that both positive (e.g. excitatory, phase-coherent) and negative (e.g. inhibitory, phase-opposing) interactions take place across brain…
The correlated variability in the responses of a neural population to the repeated presentation of a sensory stimulus is a universally observed phenomenon. Such correlations have been studied in much detail, both with respect to their…
Over repeat presentations of the same stimulus, sensory neurons show variable responses. This "noise" is typically correlated between pairs of cells, and a question with rich history in neuroscience is how these noise correlations impact…
We study the effect that the heterogeneity present among the elements of an ensemble of coupled excitable neurons have on the collective response of the system to an external signal. We have considered two different interaction scenarios,…
Discussions of the hippocampus often focus on place cells, but many neurons are not place cells in any given environment. Here we describe the collective activity in such mixed populations, treating place and non-place cells on the same…
Neurons process information in ways that depend on their cell type, connectivity, and the brain region in which they are embedded. However, inferring these factors from neural activity remains a significant challenge. To build…
Human perception and behavior are affected by the situational context, in particular during social interactions. A recent study demonstrated that humans perceive visual stimuli differently depending on whether they do the task by themselves…
Biological neurons receive multiple noisy oscillatory signals, and their dynamical response to the superposition of these signals is of fundamental importance for information processing in the brain. Here we study the response of neural…
When inhibitory neurons constitute about 40% of neurons they could have an important antinociceptive role, as they would easily regulate the level of activity of other neurons. We consider a simple network of cortical spiking neurons with…
The sensory-triggered activity of a neuron is typically characterized in terms of a tuning curve, which describes the neuron's average response as a function of a parameter that characterizes a physical stimulus. What determines the shapes…
Perceptual similarity is a cognitive judgment that represents the end-stage of a complex cascade of hierarchical processing throughout visual cortex. Previous studies have shown a correspondence between the similarity of coarse-scale fMRI…
Partially inspired by features of computation in visual cortex, deep neural networks compute hierarchical representations of their inputs. While these networks have been highly successful in machine learning, it remains unclear to what…