Related papers: Neural Coding as a Statistical Testing Problem
A primary challenge in utilizing in-vitro biological neural networks for computations is finding good encoding and decoding schemes for inputting and decoding data to and from the networks. Furthermore, identifying the optimal parameter…
Grid cells, discovered more than a decade ago [5], are neurons in the brain of mammals that fire when the animal is located near certain specific points in its familiar terrain. Intriguingly, these points form, for a single cell, a…
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,…
Fixed point networks are dynamic networks that encode stimuli via distinct output patterns. Although such networks are omnipresent in neural systems, their structures are typically unknown or poorly characterized. It is therefore valuable…
Precise control of signal propagation in modular neural networks represents a fundamental challenge in computational neuroscience. We establish a framework for identifying optimal control nodes that maximize stimulus transmission between…
Biological neural networks exist in physical space where distance influences communication delays: a fundamental coupling between space and time absent in most artificial neural networks. While recent work has separately explored spatial…
Sensory systems across all modalities and species exhibit adaptation to continuously changing input statistics. Individual neurons have been shown to modulate their response gains so as to maximize information transmission in different…
Robotic and animal mapping systems share many of the same objectives and challenges, but differ in one key aspect: where much of the research in robotic mapping has focused on solving the data association problem, the grid cell neurons…
Frequency discrimination is a fundamental task of the auditory system. The mammalian inner ear, or cochlea, provides a place code in which different frequencies are detected at different spatial locations. However, a temporal code based on…
Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
The brain has no direct access to physical stimuli, but only to the spiking activity evoked in sensory organs. It is unclear how the brain can structure its representation of the world based on differences between those noisy, correlated…
Research aimed at scaling up neuroscience inspired learning algorithms for neural networks is accelerating. Recently, a key research area has been the study of energy-based learning algorithms such as predictive coding, due to their…
Over the brief time intervals available for processing retinal output, roughly 50 to 300 msec, the number of extra spikes generated by individual ganglion cells can be quite variable. Here, computer-generated spike trains were used to…
For 20 years the beautiful structure in the grid cell code has presented an attractive puzzle: what computation do these representations subserve, and why does it manifest so curiously in neurons. The first question quickly attracted an…
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…
Dedicated systems are fundamental for neuroscience experimental protocols that require timing determinism and synchronous stimuli generation. We developed a data acquisition and stimuli generator system for neuroscience research, optimized…
Adaptation in the retina is thought to optimize the encoding of natural light signals into sequences of spikes sent to the brain. However, adaptation also entails computational costs: adaptive code is intrinsically ambiguous, because output…
The timing of individual neuronal spikes is essential for biological brains to make fast responses to sensory stimuli. However, conventional artificial neural networks lack the intrinsic temporal coding ability present in biological…
Spikes in the membrane electrical potentials of neurons play a major role in the functioning of nervous systems of animals. Obtaining the spikes from different neurons has been a challenging problem for decades. Several schemes have been…