Related papers: A General Approach to Coding in Early Olfactory an…
Scalar variables, e.g., the orientation of a shape in an image, are commonly predicted using a single output neuron in a neural network. In contrast, the mammalian cortex represents variables with a population of neurons. In this population…
Systems neuroscience relies on two complementary views of neural data, characterized by single neuron tuning curves and analysis of population activity. These two perspectives combine elegantly in neural latent variable models that…
Studies of insect olfactory processing indicate that odors are represented by rich spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity. These patterns are very difficult to predict a priori, yet they are stimulus specific and reliable upon repeated…
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…
It is widely believed that the brain performs approximate probabilistic inference to estimate causal variables in the world from ambiguous sensory data. To understand these computations, we need to analyze how information is represented and…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
The principles of neural encoding and computations are inherently collective and usually involve large populations of interacting neurons with highly correlated activities. While theories of neural function have long recognized the…
The central problem with understanding brain and mind is the neural code issue: understanding the matter of our brain as basis for the phenomena of our mind. The richness with which our mind represents our environment, the parsimony of…
We consider the problem of the evolution of a code within a structured population of agents. The agents try to maximise their information about their environment by acquiring information from the outputs of other agents in the population. A…
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…
Recordings from neurons in the insects' olfactory primary processing center, the antennal lobe (AL), reveal that the AL is able to process the input from chemical receptors into distinct neural activity patterns, called olfactory neural…
Understanding how molecular structure gives rise to odor perception remains a long-standing challenge, with ongoing debate over whether olfaction is primarily governed by molecular shape, vibrational properties, or their interplay at the…
Sensory processing is often characterized as implementing probabilistic inference: networks of neurons compute posterior beliefs over unobserved causes given the sensory inputs. How these beliefs are computed and represented by neural…
It is a fundamental behavior that different individuals see the world in a largely similar manner. This is an essential basis for humans' ability to cooperate and communicate. However, what are the neuronal properties that underlie these…
Advancing our knowledge of how the brain processes information remains a key challenge in neuroscience. This thesis combines three different approaches to the study of the dynamics of neural networks and their encoding representations: a…
Neural coding is a key problem in neuroscience, which can promote people's understanding of the mechanism that brain processes information. Among the classical theories of neural coding, the population rate coding has been studied widely in…
Sensory neurons often have variable responses to repeated presentations of the same stimulus, which can significantly degrade the stimulus information contained in those responses. This information can in principle be preserved if…
Precortical neural systems encode information collected by the senses, but the driving principles of the encoding used have remained a subject of debate. We present a model of retinal coding that is based on three constraints: information…
Neural encoding plays an important role in faithfully describing the temporally rich patterns, whose instances include human speech and environmental sounds. For tasks that involve classifying such spatio-temporal patterns with the Spiking…
Recent advances in experimental techniques have allowed the simultaneous recording of populations of hundreds of neurons, allowing more comprehensive investigation into the nature of the collective structure of population neural activity.…