Related papers: Neural Coding as a Statistical Testing Problem
Neural coding is a field of study that concerns how sensory information is represented in the brain by networks of neurons. The link between external stimulus and neural response can be studied from two parallel points of view. The first,…
Place cells in the hippocampus are active when an animal visits a certain location (referred to as a place field) within an environment. Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) respond at multiple locations, with firing fields that…
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…
Encoding the distance between locations in space is essential for accurate navigation. Grid cells, a functional class of neurons in medial entorhinal cortex, are believed to support this computation. However, existing theories of how…
We demonstrate that the information contained in the spike occurrence times of a population of neurons can be broken up into a series of terms, each of which reflect something about potential coding mechanisms. This is possible in the…
Neural correlations play a critical role in sensory information coding. They are of two kinds: signal correlations, when neurons have overlapping sensitivities, and noise correlations from network effects and shared noise. In experiments…
Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex encode the position of an animal in its environment using spatially periodic tuning curves of varying periodicity. Recent experiments established that these cells are functionally organized in discrete…
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…
Neural encoding is a field in neuroscience that focuses on characterizing how information from stimuli is encoded in the spiking activity of neurons. When more than one stimulus is present, a theory known as multiplexing posits that neurons…
Encoding information about continuous variables using noisy computational units is a challenge; nonetheless, asymptotic theory shows that combining multiple periodic scales for coding can be highly precise despite the corrupting influence…
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…
Grid cells in the brain respond when an animal occupies a periodic lattice of "grid fields" during spatial navigation. The grid scale varies along the dorso-ventral axis of the entorhinal cortex. We propose that the grid system minimizes…
Temporal coding is one approach to representing information in spiking neural networks. An example of its application is the location of sounds by barn owls that requires especially precise temporal coding. Dependent upon the azimuthal…
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…
Understanding brain function, constructing computational models and engineering neural prosthetics require assessing two problems, namely encoding and decoding, but their relation remains controversial. For decades, the encoding problem has…
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…
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…
Our knowledge of the sensory world is encoded by neurons in sequences of discrete, identical pulses termed action potentials or spikes. There is persistent controversy about the extent to which the precise timing of these spikes is relevant…
Neural decoding may be formulated as dynamic state estimation (filtering) based on point process observations, a generally intractable problem. Numerical sampling techniques are often practically useful for the decoding of real neural data.…
Cells continuously sense their surroundings to detect modifications and generate responses. Very often changes in extracellular concentrations initiate signaling cascades that eventually result in changes in gene expression. Increasing…