Related papers: Efficient population coding of sensory stimuli
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…
Understanding how the complex connectivity structure of the brain shapes its information-processing capabilities is a long-standing question. By focusing on a paradigmatic architecture, we study how the neural activity of excitatory and…
Elements of neural networks, both biological and artificial, can be described by their selectivity for specific cognitive features. Understanding these features is important for understanding the inner workings of neural networks. For a…
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…
Repeating spatiotemporal spike patterns exist and carry information. Here we investigated how a single spiking neuron can optimally respond to one given pattern (localist coding), or to either one of several patterns (distributed coding,…
Mammalian spatial navigation relies on specialized neurons, such as place and grid cells, which encode position based on self-motion and environmental cues. While extensive research has explored the computational role of grid cells, the…
A good understanding of how neurons use electrical pulses (i.e, spikes) to encode the signal information remains elusive. Analyzing spike sequences generated by individual neurons and by two coupled neurons (using the stochastic…
Recurrently connected neuron populations play key roles in sensory perception and memory storage across various brain regions. While these populations are often assumed to encode information through firing rates, this method becomes…
Network of neurons in the brain apply - unlike processors in our current generation of computer hardware - an event-based processing strategy, where short pulses (spikes) are emitted sparsely by neurons to signal the occurrence of an event…
According to the theory of efficient coding, sensory systems are adapted to represent natural scenes with high fidelity and at minimal metabolic cost. Testing this hypothesis for sensory structures performing non-linear computations on high…
Optimality principles have been useful in explaining many aspects of biological systems. In the context of neural encoding in sensory areas, optimality is naturally formulated in a Bayesian setting, as neural tuning which minimizes mean…
Information encoding in the nervous system is supported through the precise spike-timings of neurons; however, an understanding of the underlying processes by which such representations are formed in the first place remains unclear. Here we…
Sensory neurons give highly variable responses to stimulation, which can limit the amount of stimulus information available to downstream circuits. Much work has investigated the factors that affect the amount of information encoded in…
While spike timing has been shown to carry detailed stimulus information at the sensory periphery, its possible role in network computation is less clear. Most models of computation by neural networks are based on population firing rates.…
Spikes are the currency in central nervous systems for information transmission and processing. They are also believed to play an essential role in low-power consumption of the biological systems, whose efficiency attracts increasing…
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…
Which statistical features of spiking activity matter for how stimuli are encoded in neural populations? A vast body of work has explored how firing rates in individual cells and correlations in the spikes of cell pairs impact coding. But…
The activity of neurons within brain circuits has been ubiquitously reported to be correlated. The impact of these correlations on brain function has been extensively investigated. Correlations can in principle increase or decrease the…
The brain constructs population codes to represent stimuli through widely distributed patterns of activity across neurons. An important figure of merit of population codes is how much information about the original stimulus can be decoded…
The role of synchronous firing in sensory coding and cognition remains controversial. While studies, focusing on its mechanistic consequences in attentional tasks, suggest that synchronization dynamically boosts sensory processing, others…