COSYNE 2025 ePosters

Human olfactory perception is understudied in the whole spectrum of neuroscience, from computational to system neuroscience. In this study, we explore the hierarchy underlying human olfactory perception by embedding perceptual data in the hyperbolic space. Previous research emphasizes the significance of hyperbolic…

Imagine predicting the precise responses to arbitrary sensory stimuli for a neuron probed deeply within a brain. We developed a robust characterization technique called spike-triggered descent (STD) which optimally recovers n-order kernels for the very general cumulative spike response model (CSRM). This works by…

Practicing a visual task leads to long-lasting perceptual improvements in humans and other animals. However, the generalization of Visual Learning (VL) to unseen conditions varies across different tasks. Particularly, it has been shown that learning ‘easy’ visual tasks leads to better generalization than learning…

Predicting sensory input responses to update an internal ``world model'' is a core principle in cognitive learning theories that try to explain mechanisms behind representation learning in the brain [1,2]. Recent machine learning methods have also adopted predictive world modeling for self-supervised representation…

The critical brain hypothesis proposes that neural networks operate near criticality to reap the computational benefits of accessing a wide range of timescales [1]. Proponents of this viewpoint highlight the presence of heavy-tailed (power-law) spatiotemporal correlations as markers of criticality in the brain [2].…

We present, for the first time, insights into functional synchronization of individual neurons under a complete anatomical neural connectivity map at a massive scale. While functional synchrony has been extensively studied as a mechanism of information processing in the brain, previous work has been limited to small…

Cognitive flexibility is characterized by the ability to adapt behavior in response to changing environments. When the environment changes, previously appropriate behavior can lead to negative feedback. Surprising negative feedback – failure to receive a reward when strongly expected – may signal a change in the…

Mounting evidence suggests that traveling waves are a key dynamical motif in biological neural information processing systems [Muller et al., 2018], yet their precise computational role remains under investigation. While the Transformer architecture [Vaswani et al., 2023] has achieved state-of-the-art performance…

A line or a ring attractor stores active memory of an analog quantity that outlasts a transient stimulus. Such continuous attractor states can be realized by a recurrent neural network, when the connection weights are finely tuned. However, a continuum of attractor states is vulnerable to parameter variations,…

Perceptual decision-making involves interpreting sensory information to guide actions. Incoming sensory information must often be assessed in the context of other relevant information held in working memory. Despite this interdependence, the neural basis of working memory and perceptual decision-making have largely…

Reinstating details of previously seen stimuli given a recall cue is a common cognitive function. Studies suggest that such recollection involves hippocampus-mediated top-down reactivation of neural ensembles active during encoding, yet the neural mechanisms of such generative retrieval remain unknown. We formulate a…

The internal compass of the brain, also known as the head-direction (HD) system, forms a crucial component of the neural circuit necessary for effective spatial orientation, and includes regions such as the anterodorsal thalamic nucleus (ADN). It maintains a sense of orientation by integrating self-motion with local…

Neuronal activity in the primate superior colliculus (SC) is modulated by physical salience, reward value, and attention, but how these signals are integrated remains unknown. One hypothesis is that SC activity reflects a unified “priority map” of the visual field. However, it is unclear how a unified priority map…

Because the world is dynamic and only imperfectly observable, many of the decisions we make are necessarily uncertain. How do we navigate such uncertainty? From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, the classic answer would be that we evaluate the benefits of each potential choice and then lean towards the one…

Juvenile male zebra finches learn to produce a single, highly stereotyped song and maintain this song over the course of their adult lives using auditory feedback. Much of what we know of the underlying learning process comes from studies of adult male zebra finches adapting to white noise feedback triggered by either…

Foraging, the set of behaviors associated with seeking valuable resources (e.g., food, water) while avoiding danger (e.g., predators), is ubiquitous among organisms, but its neural circuit basis is presently unclear. Most existing work on navigation, a key component of foraging, involves animals in small, fully…

Navigation is inherently dynamic. It involves learning the environment, as well as positions in and trajectories through it, and then executing a path to reach a target. Spatial navigation skills vary significantly among individuals. But what differentiates a good navigator from a bad one, or an easy-to-navigate path…

Mirative markers, such as “surprisingly”, are linguistic elements that encode a violation of expectations (Delancey, 1997, 2012; Aikhenvald, 2012). Such markers are used for expectation management during communication, informing the listener about an upcoming unexpected message. Sensitivity to mirative markers relies…

Targeted photostimulation optogenetics offers unprecedented precision in perturbing neural circuits in action. However, due to the complexity of neural responses, perturbing neurons chosen randomly or based on their task selectivity often produces weak or counter-intuitive effects. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs)…

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are extremely vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where small changes to the input, unnoticeable to humans, can drastically alter the model’s predictions. One reason for their poor performance is that they process as much information as possible and make decisions based on the input…

A large part of mammalian brains is dedicated to sensory processing. Sensory receptors extract distinct but partly correlated features of the environment that vary at different timescales, and then transmit them through subcortical structures and a succession of recurrently connected cortical areas. A general theory…

Disentangling independent latent components from neural data is a desirable goal in neuroscience. Independent component analysis (ICA) has been used to identify disentangled latent neural trajectories and their corresponding sub-brain maps from recorded imaging sequences. However, enforcing full independence between…

Our ability to recognize objects and natural scenes whether depicted in photographs, cartoons, or just line drawings (a.k.a. visual cues) is remarkable. Here, we investigated the representation of a set of surface boundary shapes rendered in different visual cues by macaque V1 and V2 neurons. Specifically, we…

Normalization mechanism has often been used to describe neurons' sublinear responses to multiple stimuli in visual cortex. Neurons in the visual cortex exhibit highly heterogeneous degrees of normalization. Past work has proposed several hypotheses of the functions of normalization in both biological and artificial…