Related papers: Adaptive Filtering Enhances Information Transmissi…
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…
Brains adapt to the statistical structure of their input. In the visual system, local light intensities change rapidly, the variance of the intensity changes more slowly, and the dynamic range of contrast itself changes more slowly still.…
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…
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…
The subcortical sensory pathways are the fundamental channels for mapping the outside world to our minds. Sensory pathways efficiently transmit information by adapting neural responses to the local statistics of the sensory input. The…
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…
Sensory systems across all modalities and species exhibit adaptation to continuously changing input statistics. Individual neurons have been shown to modulate their response gains so as to maximize information transmission in different…
The primary visual cortex processes a large amount of visual information, however, due to its large receptive fields, when multiple stimuli fall within one receptive field, there are computational problems. To solve this problem, the visual…
Color Appearance Models are biological networks that consist of a cascade of linear+nonlinear layers that modify the linear measurements at the retinal photo-receptors leading to an internal (nonlinear) representation of color that…
We consider the information transmission problem in neurons and its possible implications for learning in neural networks. Our approach is based on recent developments in statistical physics and complexity science. Combining sensory…
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.…
Adaptive filtering algorithms are pervasive throughout signal processing and have had a material impact on a wide variety of domains including audio processing, telecommunications, biomedical sensing, astrophysics and cosmology, seismology,…
Adaptive reasoning enables humans to flexibly adjust inference strategies when environmental rules or contexts change, yet its underlying neural dynamics remain unclear. This study investigated the neurophysiological mechanisms of adaptive…
Two prominent strategies that the human visual system uses to reduce incoming information are spatial integration and selective attention. Although spatial integration summarizes and combines information over the visual field, selective…
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…
Primary visual cortex (V1) is the first stage of cortical image processing, and a major effort in systems neuroscience is devoted to understanding how it encodes information about visual stimuli. Within V1, many neurons respond selectively…
Our brains encode many features of the sensory world into memories: we can sing along with songs we have heard before, interpret spoken and written language composed of words we have learned, and recognize faces and objects. Where are these…
According to the theory of efficient coding, sensory systems are adapted to represent natural scenes with high fidelity and at minimal metabolic cost. Testing this hypothesis for sensory structures performing non-linear computations on high…
Barn owls hunt in the dark by using cues from both sight and sound to locate their prey. This task is facilitated by topographic maps of the external space formed by neurons (e.g., in the optic tectum) that respond to visual or aural…
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…