Related papers: Predictive coding underlies adaptation in the subc…

Much of the information the brain processes and stores is temporal in nature - a spoken word or a handwritten signature, for example, is defined by how it unfolds in time. However, it remains unclear how neural circuits encode complex…

Sensory observations about the world are invariably ambiguous. Inference about the world's latent variables is thus an important computation for the brain. However, computational constraints limit the performance of these computations.…

Traveling waves of neural activity emerge in cortical networks both spontaneously and in response to stimuli. The spatiotemporal structure of waves can indicate the information they encode and the physiological processes that sustain them.…

Almost all neural computations involve making predictions. Whether an organism is trying to catch prey, avoid predators, or simply move through a complex environment, the data it collects through its senses can guide its actions only to the…

Adaptive behavior requires the brain to transition between distinct contexts while maintaining representations of prior experience. The ability to reconfigure neural representations without erasing previously acquired knowledge is central…

We investigate cortical learning from the perspective of mechanism design. First, we show that discretizing standard models of neurons and synaptic plasticity leads to rational agents maximizing simple scoring rules. Second, our main result…

In systems neuroscience, most models posit that brain regions communicate information under constraints of efficiency. Yet, evidence for efficient communication in structural brain networks characterized by hierarchical organization and…

The relationship between a neuron's complex inputs and its spiking output defines the neuron's coding strategy. This is frequently and effectively modeled phenomenologically by one or more linear filters that extract the components of the…

The acoustic cues used by humans and other animals to localise sounds are subtle, and change during and after development. This means that we need to constantly relearn or recalibrate the auditory spatial map throughout our lifetimes. This…

Efficient coding theory posits that sensory circuits transform natural signals into neural representations that maximize information transmission subject to resource constraints. Local interneurons are thought to play an important role in…

Making sense of the world and acting in it relies on building simplified mental representations that abstract away aspects of reality. This principle of cognitive mapping is universal to agents with limited resources. Living organisms,…

The speech code is a vehicle of language: it defines a set of forms used by a community to carry information. Such a code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be…

Studies of human decision-making demonstrate that environmental regularities, such as natural image statistics or intentionally nonuniform stimulus probabilities, can be exploited to improve efficiency (termed `efficient-coding').…

Scalar inferences (SI) are a signature example of how humans interpret language based on unspoken alternatives. While empirical studies have demonstrated that human SI rates are highly variable -- both within instances of a single scale,…

We consider a cognitive radio network where primary users (PUs) employ network coding for data transmissions. We view network coding as a spectrum shaper, in the sense that it increases spectrum availability to secondary users (SUs) and…

Adaptive reasoning enables humans to flexibly adjust inference strategies when environmental rules or contexts change, yet its underlying neural dynamics remain unclear. This study investigated the neurophysiological mechanisms of adaptive…

A remarkable feature of human beings is their capacity for creative behaviour, referring to their ability to react to problems in ways that are novel, surprising, and useful. Transformational creativity is a form of creativity where the…

In the near future, more and more machines will perform tasks in the vicinity of human spaces or support them directly in their spatially bound activities. In order to simplify the verbal communication and the interaction between robotic…

For energy-efficient computation in specialized neuromorphic hardware, we present spiking neural coding, an instantiation of a family of artificial neural models grounded in the theory of predictive coding. This model, the first of its…

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…