Related papers: Neural population dynamics in songbird RA and HVC …
The means by which neuronal activity yields robust behavior is a ubiquitous question in neuroscience. In the songbird, the timing of a highly stereotyped song motif is attributed to the cortical nucleus HVC, and to feedback to HVC from…
Practice of a complex motor gesture involves exploration of motor space to attain a better match to target output, but little is known about the neural code for such exploration. Here, we examine spiking in an area of the songbird brain…
We propose a functional architecture of the adult songbird nucleus HVC in which the core element is a "functional syllable unit" (FSU). In this model, HVC is organized into FSUs, each of which provides the basis for the production of one…
Behavioral sequences of animals are often structured and can be described by probabilistic rules (or "action syntax"). The patterns of vocal elements in birdsong are a prime example. The encoding of such rules in neural circuits is poorly…
A major goal in neuroscience is to understand how populations of neurons code for stimuli or actions. While the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously is increasing at a fast pace, in most cases these recordings cannot access…
Trial-and-error learning requires evaluating variable actions and reinforcing successful variants. In songbirds, vocal exploration is induced by LMAN, the output of a basal ganglia-circuit that also contributes a corrective bias to the…
Population-based learning paradigms, including evolutionary strategies, Population-Based Training (PBT), and recent model-merging methods, combine fast within-model optimisation with slower population-level adaptation. Despite their…
The problem of deciphering how low-level patterns (action potentials in the brain, amino acids in a protein, etc.) drive high-level biological features (sensorimotor behavior, enzymatic function) represents the central challenge of…
Studies of motor control have almost universally examined firing rates to investigate how the brain shapes behavior. In principle, however, neurons could encode information through the precise temporal patterning of their spike trains as…
Consecutive repetition of actions is common in behavioral sequences. Although integration of sensory feedback with internal motor programs is important for sequence generation, if and how feedback contributes to repetitive actions is poorly…
Neural population activity relating to behaviour is assumed to be inherently low-dimensional despite the observed high dimensionality of data recorded using multi-electrode arrays. Therefore, predicting behaviour from neural population…
With the goal of building a model of the HVC nucleus in the avian song system, we discuss in detail a model of HVC$_{\text{RA}}$ projection neurons comprised of a somatic compartment with fast Na$^+$ and K$^+$ currents and a dendritic…
Decoding stimuli or behaviour from recorded neural activity is a common approach to interrogate brain function in research, and an essential part of brain-computer and brain-machine interfaces. Reliable decoding even from small neural…
Oscillations are a hallmark of neural population activity in various brain regions with a spectrum covering a wide range of frequencies. Within this spectrum gamma oscillations have received particular attention due to their ubiquitous…
How natural communication sounds are spatially represented across the inferior colliculus, the main center of convergence for auditory information in the midbrain, is not known. The neural representation of the acoustic stimuli results from…
Advances in large-scale neural recordings have expanded our ability to describe the activity of distributed brain circuits. However, understanding how neural population dynamics differ across regions and behavioral contexts remains…
We study the impact of noise on a neural population rate model of up and down states. Up and down states are typically observed in neuronal networks as a slow oscillation, where the population switches between high and low firing rates…
Neurons process sensory stimuli efficiently, showing sparse yet highly variable ensemble spiking activity involving structured higher-order interactions. Notably, while neural populations are mostly silent, they occasionally exhibit highly…
Neural population activity often exhibits rich variability and temporal structure. This variability is thought to arise from single-neuron stochasticity, neural dynamics on short time-scales, as well as from modulations of neural firing…
We hypothesized that rhythmic motor acts entrain neural oscillations in speech production brain regions. We tested this hypothesis in an experiment where a subject produced consonant-vowel (CV) syllables in a rhythmic fashion, while we…