Related papers: Temporal processing and context dependency in C. e…

Artificial behavioral agents are often evaluated based on their consistent behaviors and performance to take sequential actions in an environment to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. However, human decision making in real life…

The motor cortex (MC) is often described as an autonomous dynamical system during movement execution. In an autonomous dynamical system, flexible movement generation depends on reconfiguring the initial conditions, which then unwind along…

Motor systems show an overall robustness, but because they are highly nonlinear, understanding how they achieve robustness is difficult. In many rhythmic systems, robustness against perturbations involves response of both the shape and the…

Detection and location of moving prey utilizing electrosense or mechanosense is a strategy commonly followed by animals which cannot rely on visual sense or hearing. In this article we consider the possibility to detect the source of a…

The adaptive fitness of an organism in its ecological niche is highly reliant upon its ability to associate an environmental or internal stimulus with a behavior response through reinforcement. This simple but powerful observation has been…

Humans and animals have a rich and flexible understanding of the physical world, which enables them to infer the underlying dynamical trajectories of objects and events, plausible future states, and use that to plan and anticipate the…

A central problem of neuroscience involves uncovering the principles governing the organization of nervous systems which ensure robustness in brain development. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans provides us with a model organism for…

Brain mechanics is a topic of deep interest because of the significant role of mechanical cues in both brain function and form. Specifically, capturing the heterogeneous and anisotropic behaviour of cerebral white matter (WM) is extremely…

Competition between synapses arises in some forms of correlation-based plasticity. Here we propose a game theory-inspired model of synaptic interactions whose dynamics is driven by competition between synapses in their weak and strong…

Experiments of pain with human subjects are difficult, subjective, and ethically constrained. Since the molecular mechanisms of pain transduction are reasonably conserved among different species, these problems are partially solved by the…

In large neuronal networks, it is believed that functions emerge through the collective behavior of many interconnected neurons. Recently, the development of experimental techniques that allow simultaneous recording of calcium concentration…

Active sensing is traditionally defined as the expenditure of energy, typically in the form of movement, for obtaining information. Here, we propose that the combination of reliance on adaptive sensors, the linkage between movement and…

Flexible modulation of temporal dynamics in neural sequences underlies many cognitive processes. For instance, we can adaptively change the speed of motor sequences and speech. While such flexibility is influenced by various factors such as…

Animals exploit time to survive in the world. Temporal information is required for higher-level cognitive abilities such as planning, decision making, communication, and effective cooperation. Since time is an inseparable part of cognition,…

Recordings of whole brain activity with single neuron resolution are now feasible in simple organisms. Yet, it is still challenging to appropriately simplify such complex, noisy, and multivariate data in order to reveal general principles…

We propose a decoding-based approach to detect context effects on neural codes in longitudinal neural recording data. The approach is agnostic to how information is encoded in neural activity, and can control for a variety of possible…

A core challenge for the brain is to process information across various timescales. This could be achieved by a hierarchical organization of temporal processing through intrinsic mechanisms (e.g., recurrent coupling or adaptation), but…

The human brain is autonomously active, being characterized by a self-sustained neural activity which would be present even in the absence of external sensory stimuli. Here we study the interrelation between the self-sustained activity in…

The relation between spontaneous and stimulated global brain activity is a fundamental problem in the understanding of brain functions. This question is investigated both theoretically and experimentally within the context of nonequilibrium…

Inputs to signaling pathways can have complex statistics that depend on the environment and on the behavioral response to previous stimuli. Such behavioral feedback is particularly important in navigation. Successful navigation relies on…