Related papers: A descriptive analysis of olfactory sensation and …
Studies of insect olfactory processing indicate that odors are represented by rich spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity. These patterns are very difficult to predict a priori, yet they are stimulus specific and reliable upon repeated…
Animals smelling in the real world use a small number of receptors to sense a vast number of natural molecular mixtures, and proceed to learn arbitrary associations between odors and valences. Here, we propose a new interpretation of how…
Recordings from neurons in the insects' olfactory primary processing center, the antennal lobe (AL), reveal that the AL is able to process the input from chemical receptors into distinct neural activity patterns, called olfactory neural…
Storing memory for molecular recognition is an efficient strategy for responding to external stimuli. Biological processes use different strategies to store memory. In the olfactory cortex, synaptic connections form when stimulated by an…
Early olfactory pathway responses to the presentation of an odor exhibit remarkably similar dynamical behavior across phyla from insects to mammals, and frequently involve transitions among quiescence, collective network oscillations, and…
Continual learning in computational systems is challenging due to catastrophic forgetting. We discovered a two layer neural circuit in the fruit fly olfactory system that addresses this challenge by uniquely combining sparse coding and…
Advances in neural sensing technology are making it possible to observe the olfactory process in great detail. In this paper, we conceptualize smell from a Data Science and AI perspective, that relates the properties of odorants to how they…
The reshaping and decorrelation of similar activity patterns by neuronal networks can enhance their discriminability, storage, and retrieval. How can such networks learn to decorrelate new complex patterns, as they arise in the olfactory…
Olfactory receptor usage is highly heterogeneous, with some receptor types being orders of magnitude more abundant than others. We propose an explanation for this striking fact: the receptor distribution is tuned to maximally represent…
This thesis is designed to be a self-contained exposition of the neurobiological and mathematical aspects of sensory perception, memory, and learning with a bias towards olfaction. The final chapters introduce a new approach to modeling…
The olfactory system employs responses of an ensemble of odorant receptors (ORs) to sense molecules and to generate olfactory percepts. Here we hypothesized that ORs can be viewed as 3D spatial filters that extract molecular features…
Naturally occurring networks exhibit quantitative features revealing underlying growth mechanisms. Numerous network mechanisms have recently been proposed to reproduce specific properties such as degree distributions or clustering…
Artificial neural networks face the stability-plasticity dilemma in continual learning, while the brain can maintain memories and remain adaptable. However, the biological strategies for continual learning and their potential to inspire…
Associative learning allows animals to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment. Whether and what aspects of such acquired traits may be transmittable across generations remains unclear. Using prolonged olfactory training and subsequent…
Living systems continually respond to signals from the surrounding environment. Survival requires that their responses adapt quickly and robustly to the changes in the environment. One particularly challenging example is olfactory…
The insect olfactory system, which includes the antennal lobe (AL), mushroom body (MB), and ancillary structures, is a relatively simple neural system capable of learning. Its structural features, which are widespread in biological neural…
How intelligence emerges from living beings has been a fundamental question in neuroscience. However, it remains largely unanswered due to the complex neuronal dynamics and intricate connections between neurons in real neural systems. To…
Predicting the relationship between a molecule's structure and its odor remains a difficult, decades-old task. This problem, termed quantitative structure-odor relationship (QSOR) modeling, is an important challenge in chemistry, impacting…
Insect vision supports complex behaviors including associative learning, navigation, and object detection, and has long motivated computational models for understanding biological visual processing. However, many contemporary models…
Recent experimental and theoretical work on neural populations belonging to two separate early sensory systems, olfaction and vision, has challenged the notion that the two operate under different computational paradigms by providing…