Related papers: Context dependent adaptation in a neural computati…

Sensory neuroscience seeks to understand how the brain encodes natural environments. However, neural coding has largely been studied using simplified stimuli. In order to assess whether the brain's coding strategy depend on the stimulus…

Most neurons in the primary visual cortex initially respond vigorously when a preferred stimulus is presented, but adapt as stimulation continues. The functional consequences of adaptation are unclear. Typically a reduction of firing rate…

The brain processes visual inputs having structure over a large range of spatial scales. The precise mechanisms or algorithms used by the brain to achieve this feat are largely unknown and an open problem in visual neuroscience. In…

Human visual perception is a complex, dynamic and fluctuating process. In addition to the incoming visual stimulus, it is affected by many other factors including temporal context, both external and internal to the observer. In this study…

Cognitive control, the ability of a system to adapt to the demands of a task, is an integral part of cognition. A widely accepted fact about cognitive control is that it is context-sensitive: Adults and children alike infer information…

Modern machine learning models typically represent inputs as fixed points in a high-dimensional embedding space. While this approach has been proven powerful for a wide range of downstream tasks, it fundamentally differs from the way humans…

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…

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…

A critical visual computation is to construct global scene properties from activities of early visual cortical neurons which have small receptive fields. Such a computation is enabled by contextual influences, through which a neuron's…

Brains have evolved diverse neurons with varying morphologies and dynamics that impact temporal information processing. In contrast, most neural network models use homogeneous units that vary only in spatial parameters (weights and biases).…

When we interact with small screen devices, sometimes we make errors, due to our abilities/disabilities, contextual factors that distract our attention or problems related to the interface. Recovering from these errors may be time consuming…

It has been argued that humans rapidly adapt their lexical and syntactic expectations to match the statistics of the current linguistic context. We provide further support to this claim by showing that the addition of a simple adaptation…

In this paper we address the problem of visual reaction: the task of interacting with dynamic environments where the changes in the environment are not necessarily caused by the agent itself. Visual reaction entails predicting the future…

Human perception and behavior are affected by the situational context, in particular during social interactions. A recent study demonstrated that humans perceive visual stimuli differently depending on whether they do the task by themselves…

Visual recognition takes a small fraction of a second and relies on the cascade of signals along the ventral visual stream. Given the rapid path through multiple processing steps between photoreceptors and higher visual areas, information…

We study a wide field motion sensitive neuron in the visual system of the blowfly {\em Calliphora vicina}. By rotating the fly on a stepper motor outside in a wooded area, and along an angular motion trajectory representative of natural…

Behavior results from the integration of ongoing sensory signals and contextual information in various forms, such as past experience, expectations, current goals, etc. Thus, the response to a specific stimulus, say the ringing of a…

Cognition does not only depend on bottom-up sensor feature abstraction, but also relies on contextual information being passed top-down. Context is higher level information that helps to predict belief states at lower levels. The main…

Top-down attention allows people to focus on task-relevant visual information. Is the resulting perceptual boost task-dependent in naturalistic settings? We aim to answer this with a large-scale computational experiment. First, we design a…

We describe a mechanism by which artificial neural networks can learn rapid adaptation - the ability to adapt on the fly, with little data, to new tasks - that we call conditionally shifted neurons. We apply this mechanism in the framework…