Related papers: Spaces and sequences in the hippocampus: a homolog…
Neural systems can be modeled as networks of functionally connected neural elements. The resulting network can be analyzed using mathematical tools from network science and graph theory to quantify the system's topological organization and…
In the mammalian brain newly acquired memories depend on the hippocampus for maintenance and recall, but over time these functions are taken over by the neocortex through a process called systems consolidation. However, reactivation of a…
In "The Organization of Behavior" (Hebb, 1949), Hebb suggested that the propagation of activity between transiently grouped neurons plays an important role in behavior. Since then, multiple studies have provided evidence supporting Hebb's…
Hippocampal neurons track positions of self, others, and gaze direction. However, it is unclear how their respective neural codes differ enough to avoid confusion while allowing for abstraction. We recorded from populations of hippocampal…
Sequential firing of hippocampal place cells is often attributed to sequential sensory drive along a trajectory, and has also been attributed to planning and other cognitive functions. Here, we propose a mechanistic and parsimonious…
Persistent homology analysis provides means to capture the connectivity structure of data sets in various dimensions. On the mathematical level, by defining a metric between the objects that persistence attaches to data sets, we can…
Learning and interpreting the structure of the environment is an innate feature of biological systems, and is integral to guiding flexible behaviours for evolutionary viability. The concept of a cognitive map has emerged as one of the…
Detecting meaningful structure in neural activity and connectivity data is challenging in the presence of hidden nonlinearities, where traditional eigenvalue-based methods may be misleading. We introduce a novel approach to matrix analysis,…
We use Topological Data Analysis tools for studying the inner organization of cells in segmented images of epithelial tissues. More specifically, for each segmented image, we compute different persistence barcodes, which codify lifetime of…
All intelligence is collective intelligence, in the sense that it is made of parts which must align with respect to system-level goals. Understanding the dynamics which facilitate or limit navigation of problem spaces by aligned parts thus…
Living systems exhibit complex yet organized behavior on multiple spatiotemporal scales. To investigate the nature of multiscale coordination in living systems, one needs a meaningful and systematic way to quantify the complex dynamics, a…
Several approaches to cognition and intelligence research rely on statistics-based models testing, namely factor analysis. In the present work we exploit the emerging dynamical systems perspective putting the focus on the role of the…
The effectiveness of Spatio-temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) in time-series applications is often limited by their dependence on fixed, hand-crafted input graph structures. Motivated by insights from the Topological Data Analysis…
This paper proposes the External Hippocampus framework, which models language model reasoning from a cognitive dynamics perspective as the flow of information energy in semantic space. Unlike traditional weight-space optimization methods,…
In this article, we introduce a Topological Data Analysis (TDA) pipeline for neural spike train data. Understanding how the brain transforms sensory information into perception and behavior requires analyzing coordinated neural population…
Small-World Networks (SWNs) represent a fundamental model for the comprehension of many complex man-made and biological networks. In the central nervous system, SWN models have been shown to fit well both anatomical and functional maps at…
Functional brain connectivity changes dynamically over time, making its representation challenging for learning on non-Euclidean data. We present a framework that encodes dynamic functional connectivity as an image representation of…
The vertebrate hippocampus is believed to use recurrent connectivity in area CA3 to support episodic memory recall from partial cues. This brain area also contains place cells, whose location-selective firing fields implement maps…
Spatial learning across many species is impaired by lesions in the hippocampus, a subcortical brain structure whose cellular composition changes substantially over its 5 to 6 week lifetime from mainly excitatory neurons during development…
Cascades arise in many contexts (e.g., neuronal avalanches, social contagions, and system failures). Despite evidence that propagations often involve higher-order dependencies, cascade theory has largely focused on models with…