COSYNE 2022 ePosters

Neurons spike spontaneously in many experimental settings. Such firing patterns are often characterized by prolonged periods of silence followed by an unknown trigger of spontaneous activity that propagates throughout the slice. These were dubbed `neural avalanches' as they resemble avalanches in which accumulated…

Children learn to build a visual representation of the world from unsupervised exploration and we hypothesize that a key part of this learning ability is the use of self-generated navigational information as a similarity label to drive a learning objective for self-supervised learning. The goal of this work is to…

When an agent is trained on a complex episodic task, different task parts may be learned at different rates. How do we determine which part of the task challenged the agent the most? Since reward is provided usually only at the end of each trial, it cannot be used to infer within-trial learning trends. Behavioral…

We trained five rats to perform a complex auditory-guided task in a large environment (diameter 160 cm) with twelve nose-poke ports. To obtain rewards, rats had to position themselves at specific locations indicated by sounds. Despite the nontrivial task, rats reached high success rates within two 70-minute sessions.…

The representation of “what happened when” is central to encoding episodic and working memories. Recently discovered hippocampal “time cells” are theorized to provide the neural substrate for such representations by forming distinct sequences that encode both time elapsed and sensory content. However, while multiple…

Space can be a limited resource. Many species including humans, evolved a compromise regulating space sharing and its occupancy based on social determinants. For example, students in a classroom tend to sit close to their friends, keeping the same spots across days, revealing the social structure in the classroom.…

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) can restore voluntary movement to people with paralysis by translating their brain activity into a control signal for an external device. Maintaining stable iBCI performance is challenging due to instabilities at the neural interface, such as shifts in electrode position…

Saccades are fast eye movements that change gaze direction in a ballistic fashion. Human saccadic behaviour has been studied extensively in neuroscience and several methods have been proposed to model the saccadic system. For example, John et al. (2021) adopted a model-based approach, based on a physical model of the…

Sensory neural circuits rely on a common set of motifs to process inputs, including convergence of multiple inputs to a single neuron, divergence of inputs into parallel pathways, and nonlinearities that are selective for some inputs over others. Past work has detailed how optimized response nonlinearities and…

The error-backpropagation (backprop) algorithm has stood at the forefront as a solution to the credit assignment problem in artificial neural networks. Whether the brain adopts a similar strategy to ensure that the correct synapses are modified remains unclear. Recent work has attempted to bridge this gap with…

Experimental and computational studies suggest that motor cortex acts as a feedback controller, allowing for ‘on-the-fly’ movement corrections in response to afferent sensory feedback. However, it remains unclear whether feedback control relates to longer-term learning, and how this would be implemented in neural…

During mammalian neural development, mitotic cells sense local cues and morphogenic gradients to form complex and coherent processing systems, such as the cerebral cortex, that contains billions of neurons classified into different cell types. We use agent-based simulations of cellular growth and differentiation to…

Neural information processing in dynamic, natural environments requires the brain to flexibly allocate limited computational resources to varying task demands. One example is selective attention in the visual system, which allows to preferentially route signals from behaviourally relevant stimuli to downstream visual…

The superior colliculus (SC) is a major recipient of visual input in the mouse and controls innate approach and avoidance behaviours. Neurons in the superficial SC (sSC), which receives direct input from the retina, do not only process visual stimuli, but are also modulated by the animal’s running speed and…

The successor representation (SR) is a promising candidate principle for hippocampal function. Theory proposes that each place cell encodes the expected state occupancy of its target location in the near future. This framework has desirable consequences on the generalisability and efficiency of reinforcement learning…

Visual textures efficiently represent real-world information that is essential for perceptual tasks like pattern detection, object segmentation and classification. This information appears to be encoded in intermediate areas along the primate ventral visual stream (areas V2-V4), but how textural selectivity emerges at…

Consider a task where you're accumulating noisy evidence about two options, and the longer you collect evidence the more likely you are to choose the correct one. You get $1,000 for choosing the correct option and $900 for choosing the incorrect one. How long should you wait before making a decision? Tasks like this…

One-shot learning can be achieved by animals and algorithms, but how animals do it is poorly understood as most of the algorithms are not biologically plausible. Experiments studying one-shot learning in rodents have shown that after initial gradual learning of associations between cues and locations, new associations…

Summary: Modulation of neural activity by hormones, peptides, and other small molecules is known to be required for learning, motor control, and homeostasis, and it can induce similarly structured networks to exhibit different behaviors. Yet, relatively few theoretic studies have attempted to detangle the role and…

The hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) participate in episodic and working memory, respectively. In trace conditioning, animals learn to associate a sensory stimulus (CS) and a reward (US) separated by a delay (trace period). Although the neural activity in both areas can be linked to memory…

A major problem in systems neuroscience, specifically in sensory-motor control, is understanding how the brain plans and executes proper movements in the face of delayed and noisy stimuli. A prominent framework for addressing such control problems is Optimal Feedback Control (OFC). OFC generates control actions that…

We learn different rules that can switch depending on context. When the rule depends on context, the context is important to learn to differentiate the rewarded choice in different contexts. While it has previously been shown that the reinstatement of context guides decisions for reward, it is less clear how or…

Hierarchical cortical organization unifies the brain’s structural and functional organization, yet its relationship to task-evoked cognitive processes remains unclear. How might intrinsic hierarchical properties shape and constrain the cognitive processes required to perform the wide variety of tasks encountered in…

Recent work has shown that spontaneous movements are represented throughout the brain, even in sensory areas such as primary visual cortex (V1). Interference between visual stimuli and movement is minimized in V1 because they are encoded in orthogonal subspaces, but it is not known how these subspaces are formed.…