Related papers: Analyzing neural responses to natural signals: Max…

The computation performed by a neuron can be formulated as a combination of dimensional reduction in stimulus space and the nonlinearity inherent in a spiking output. White noise stimulus and reverse correlation (the spike-triggered average…

Neural population responses in sensory systems are driven by external physical stimuli. This stimulus-response relationship is typically characterized by receptive fields, which have been estimated by neural system identification…

The brain effortlessly extracts latent causes of stimuli, but how it does this at the network level remains unknown. Most prior attempts at this problem proposed neural networks that implement independent component analysis which works…

A spiking neuron ``computes'' by transforming a complex dynamical input into a train of action potentials, or spikes. The computation performed by the neuron can be formulated as dimensional reduction, or feature detection, followed by a…

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…

Generative models of brain activity have been instrumental in testing hypothesized mechanisms underlying brain dynamics against experimental datasets. Beyond capturing the key mechanisms underlying spontaneous brain dynamics, these models…

To make sense of the world our brains must analyze high-dimensional datasets streamed by our sensory organs. Because such analysis begins with dimensionality reduction, modelling early sensory processing requires biologically plausible…

Neuronal dynamics is driven by externally imposed or internally generated random excitations/noise, and is often described by systems of random or stochastic ordinary differential equations. Such systems admit a distribution of solutions,…

Characterising the representation of sensory stimuli in the brain is a fundamental scientific endeavor, which can illuminate principles of information coding. Most characterizations reduce the dimensionality of neural data by converting…

Current trend in neurosciences is to use naturalistic stimuli, such as cinema, class-room biology or video gaming, aiming to understand the brain functions during ecologically valid conditions. Naturalistic stimuli recruit complex and…

Humans and other animals base their decisions on noisy sensory input. Much work has therefore been devoted to understanding the computations that underly such decisions. The problem has been studied in a variety of tasks and with stimuli of…

The relation between spontaneous and stimulated global brain activity is a fundamental problem in the understanding of brain functions. This question is investigated both theoretically and experimentally within the context of nonequilibrium…

Neural decoding may be formulated as dynamic state estimation (filtering) based on point process observations, a generally intractable problem. Numerical sampling techniques are often practically useful for the decoding of real neural data.…

This paper compares a family of methods for characterizing neural feature selectivity with natural stimuli in the framework of the linear-nonlinear model. In this model, the neural firing rate is a nonlinear function of a small number of…

The correlated variability in the responses of a neural population to the repeated presentation of a sensory stimulus is a universally observed phenomenon. Such correlations have been studied in much detail, both with respect to their…

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…

With our ability to record more neurons simultaneously, making sense of these data is a challenge. Functional connectivity is one popular way to study the relationship between multiple neural signals. Correlation-based methods are a set of…

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…

Multilayer (or deep) networks are powerful probabilistic models based on multiple stages of a linear transform followed by a non-linear (possibly random) function. In general, the linear transforms are defined by matrices and the non-linear…

The electroencephalography (EEG), which is one of the easiest modes of recording brain activations in a non-invasive manner, is often distorted due to recording artifacts which adversely impacts the stimulus-response analysis. The most…