Related papers: Same Cause; Different Effects in the Brain
Connecting neural activity to function is a common aim in neuroscience. How to define and conceptualize function, however, can vary. Here I focus on grounding this goal in the specific question of how a given change in behavior is produced…
Recent advances in brain-vision decoding have driven significant progress, reconstructing with high fidelity perceived visual stimuli from neural activity, e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in the human visual cortex. Most…
Over the past decade, studies of naturalistic language processing where participants are scanned while listening to continuous text have flourished. Using word embeddings at first, then large language models, researchers have created…
Intrinsic brain activity is characterized by highly structured co-activations between different regions, whose origin is still under debate. In this paper, we address the question whether it is possible to unveil how the underlying…
The functional computation of the human brain arises from the collective behaviour of the underlying neural network. The emerging technology enables the recording of population activity in neurons, and the theory of neural networks is…
The characterization of coordinated activity in neuronal populations has received renewed interest in the light of advancing experimental techniques which allow recordings from multiple units simultaneously. Across both in vitro and in vivo…
Codifying memories is one of the fundamental problems of modern Neuroscience. The functional mechanisms behind this phenomenon remain largely unknown. Experimental evidence suggests that some of the memory functions are performed by…
Models of neural responses to stimuli with complex spatiotemporal correlation structure often assume that neurons are only selective for a small number of linear projections of a potentially high-dimensional input. Here we explore recent…
Neuroscience theory posits that the brain's visual system coarsely identifies broad object categories via neural activation patterns, with similar objects producing similar neural responses. Artificial neural networks also have internal…
Perceptions and actions, thoughts and memories result from coordinated activity in hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain. It is an old dream of the physics community to provide a statistical mechanics description for these and…
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…
A neuroscience method to understanding the brain is to find and study the preferred stimuli that highly activate an individual cell or groups of cells. Recent advances in machine learning enable a family of methods to synthesize preferred…
The effects of temperature on various aspects of neural activity from single cell to neural circuit level have long been known. However, how temperature affects the system-level of activity typical of experiments using non-invasive imaging…
Semantic representations are integral to natural language processing, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence. Although often derived from internet text, recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of behavior-based (e.g., free…
Why do biological and artificial neurons sometimes modularise, each encoding a single meaningful variable, and sometimes entangle their representation of many variables? In this work, we develop a theory of when biologically inspired…
Synchronous neural activity can improve neural processing and is believed to mediate neuronal interaction by providing temporal windows during which information is more easily transferred. We demonstrate a pulse gating mechanism in a…
Persistent activity in neuronal populations has been shown to represent the spatial position of remembered stimuli. Networks that support bump attractors are often used to model such persistent activity. Such models usually exhibit…
How the information microscopically processed by individual neurons is integrated and used in organizing the behavior of an animal is a central question in neuroscience. The coherence of neuronal dynamics over different scales has been…
Sensory stimuli are usually composed of different features (the what) appearing at irregular times (the when). Neural responses often use spike patterns to represent sensory information. The what is hypothesized to be encoded in the…
Understanding the basic operational logics of the nervous system is essential to advancing neuroscientific research. However, theoretical efforts to tackle this fundamental problem are lacking, despite the abundant empirical data about the…