Related papers: Spectral-Stimulus Information for Self-Supervised …
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…
Neuromorphic applications emulate the processing performed by the brain by using spikes as inputs instead of time-varying analog stimuli. Therefore, these time-varying stimuli have to be encoded into spikes, which can induce important…
The efficient coding theory postulates that single cells in a neuronal population should be optimally configured to efficiently encode information about a stimulus subject to biophysical constraints. This poses the question of how multiple…
Neural populations encode information about their stimulus in a collective fashion, by joint activity patterns of spiking and silence. A full account of this mapping from stimulus to neural activity is given by the conditional probability…
To compensate for sensory processing delays, the visual system must make predictions to ensure timely and appropriate behaviors. Recent work has found predictive information about the stimulus in neural populations early in vision…
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…
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…
In this work we explore encoding strategies learned by statistical models of sensory coding in noisy spiking networks. Early stages of sensory communication in neural systems can be viewed as encoding channels in the information-theoretic…
A novel definition of the stimulus-specific information is presented, which is particularly useful when the stimuli constitute a continuous and metric set, as for example, position in space. The approach allows one to build the spatial…
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,…
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…
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…
Cells in natural environments like tissue or soil sense and respond to extracellular ligands with intricately structured and non-monotonic spatial distributions that are sculpted by processes such as fluid flow and substrate adhesion.…
Spatial navigation in mammals is based on building a mental representation of their environment---a cognitive map. However, both the nature of this cognitive map and its underpinning in neural structures and activity remains vague. A key…
We consider the information transmission problem in neurons and its possible implications for learning in neural networks. Our approach is based on recent developments in statistical physics and complexity science. Combining sensory…
We study a model of spiking neurons, with recurrent connections that result from learning a set of spatio-temporal patterns with a spike-timing dependent plasticity rule and a global inhibition. We investigate the ability of the network to…
To date a number of studies have shown that receptive field shapes of early sensory neurons can be reproduced by optimizing coding efficiency of natural stimulus ensembles. A still unresolved question is whether the efficient coding…
To study information processing in the brain, neuroscientists manipulate experimental stimuli while recording participant brain activity. They can then use encoding models to find out which brain "zone" (e.g. which region of interest,…
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…
One step in the conventional analysis of extracellularly recorded neuronal data is spike sorting, which separates electrical signal into action potentials from different neurons. Because spike sorting involves human judgment, it can be…