Related papers: Symbols and synergy in a neural code

Over repeat presentations of the same stimulus, sensory neurons show variable responses. This "noise" is typically correlated between pairs of cells, and a question with rich history in neuroscience is how these noise correlations impact…

Environmental signals sensed by nervous systems are often represented in spike trains carried from sensory neurons to higher neural functions where decisions and functional actions occur. Information about the environmental stimulus is…

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…

Semantic communication systems often use an end-to-end neural network to map input data into continuous symbols. These symbols, which are essentially neural network features, usually have fixed dimensions and heavy-tailed distributions.…

Neural correlations play a critical role in sensory information coding. They are of two kinds: signal correlations, when neurons have overlapping sensitivities, and noise correlations from network effects and shared noise. In experiments…

This invited paper introduces the concept of "proof-carrying neuro-symbolic code" and explains its meaning and value, from both the "neural" and the "symbolic" perspectives. The talk outlines the first successes and challenges that this new…

This work is part of an effort to understand the neural basis for our visual system's ability, or failure, to accurately track moving visual signals. We consider here a ring model of spiking neurons, intended as a simplified computational…

Understanding how neural activity gives rise to perception is a central challenge in neuroscience. We address the problem of decoding visual information from high-density intracortical recordings in primates, using the THINGS Ventral Stream…

In the past decade, a small corner of the fly's visual system has become an important testing ground for ideas about coding and computation in the nervous system. A number of results demonstrate that this system operates with a precision…

An essential step toward understanding neural circuits is linking their structure and their dynamics. In general, this relationship can be almost arbitrarily complex. Recent theoretical work has, however, begun to identify some broad…

We study how threshold model neurons transfer temporal and interneuronal input correlations to correlations of spikes. We find that the low common input regime is governed by firing rate dependent spike correlations which are sensitive to…

We study a network model of two conductance-based pacemaker neurons of differing natural frequency, coupled with either mutual excitation or inhibition, and receiving shared random inhibitory synaptic input. The networks may phase-lock…

The role of synchronous firing in sensory coding and cognition remains controversial. While studies, focusing on its mechanistic consequences in attentional tasks, suggest that synchronization dynamically boosts sensory processing, others…

Short-term changes in efficacy have been postulated to enhance the ability of synapses to transmit information between neurons, and within neuronal networks. Even at the level of connections between single neurons, direct confirmation of…

Spiking Neural P systems, SNP systems for short, are biologically inspired computing devices based on how neurons perform computations. SNP systems use only one type of symbol, the spike, in the computations. Information is encoded in the…

Biological systems represent time from microseconds to years. An important gap in our knowledge concerns the mechanisms for encoding time intervals of hundreds of milliseconds to minutes that matter for tasks like navigation, communication,…

We take the testing perspective to understand what the minimal discrimination time between two stimuli is for different types of rate coding neurons. Our main goal is to describe the testing abilities of two different encoding systems:…

Recent advances in neural recording technology allow simultaneously recording action potentials from hundreds to thousands of neurons in awake, behaving animals. However, characterizing spike patterns in the resulting data, and linking…

Molecular communication requires low-complexity symbol detection algorithms to deal with the many sources of uncertainty that are inherent in these channels. This paper proposes two variants of a high-performance asynchronous peak detection…

Sampling considerations limit the experimental conditions under which information theoretic analyses of neurophysiological data yield reliable results. We develop a procedure for computing the full temporal entropy and information of…