We use cookies for analytics.
453 results
Population recording offer a window into the underlying dynamics of brain regions. Latent Variable Models (LVMs) infer these dynamics treating the observations as projections from the latents. Evaluating the quality of these models remains challenging, as we don't have access to the true underlying dynamics. A common…
We hypothesize that the principle of wiring economy provides a compelling constraint for the spatial arrangement of Drosophila olfactory glomeruli. By comparing the wiring cost of actual glomerular organization with random configurations, we validated the role of wiring economy in shaping the spatial distribution of…
The brain needs to process high-dimensional sensory information in order to control the non-linear dynamics of body movements. One view posits that it does so modularly with different brain regions solving specific and distinct objectives that can be studied quasi-independently (e.g. visual classification in the…
The ability to switch between different behaviors is essential to all animals’ survival. Behavior selection is influenced by sensory inputs, internal states, and memory, suggesting that neural mechanisms across the brain coordinate these decisions. While investigating the neural basis of behavioral switching requires…
Many animals rely on olfactory cues to navigate their environments. For example, insects are particularly adept at locating odor sources. The navigational algorithms of insects have often been modeled as simple sensorimotor reflexes based on instantaneous cues: surging upwind when encountering the odor and casting…
Constructing well-motivated methodologies for quantifying similarity between high-dimensional neural representations is an active research in computational neuroscience. Such similarity measures have implications for understanding variability in neural computations across individuals and species [1], as well as for…
Despite the diversity of neural responses, the brain is highly structured both at anatomical and functional levels. Neurons in different brain areas exhibit different response profiles (large-scale anatomical organization), and within brain areas, the neurons can sometimes be grouped together into specialized…
Current electrophysiological approaches can track the activity of many neurons, yet it is usually unknown which cell-types or brain areas are being recorded without further molecular or histological analysis. Developing accurate and scalable algorithms for identifying the cell-type and brain region of recorded neurons…
Humans, dolphins, and elephants are the only known species that vocally label their conspecifics. It remains unclear whether nonhuman primates share this ability. By recording hundreds of spontaneous “phee-call” dialogues between pairs of marmoset monkeys we discovered that marmosets use these calls to vocally label…
Working memory, the process through which information is transiently maintained and manipulated over a brief period, is essential for most cognitive functions. However, the mechanisms underlying the generation and evolution of working- memory neuronal representations at the population level over long timescales remain…
The accuracy of behavior is constrained by the encoding of sensory information. However little is known about how reliable encoding emerges as animals develop during early life. A better understanding of these developmental processes has the potential to aid in the design of artificial learning systems, and help…
The fact that the eyes are constantly in motion, even during ‘fixation’, implies that retinal ganglion cells' spike times carry information about the visual scene even when the scene is static. Moreover, this motion implies that fine details of the visual scene could not be decoded from pure spatial retinal…
Spatial navigation relies on external cues, such as visual objects, to anchor internal representations of space. In rodents, moving a visual landmark results in a corresponding shift in the tuning of head direction (HD) cells1. However, little is known about where visual objects are encoded in the mouse brain2 or how…
Animals must infer the three-dimensional structure of the surrounding world from two-dimensional images on their retinas. For instance, animals use visual cues like motion parallax and binocular disparity to judge distances to objects as they navigate their environment. Although studies in several vision models have…
Algorithms generate input-output mappings through step-by-step operations on representations. Cognitive scientists use algorithms to explain mental processes. For example, they use tree-search algorithms to explain planning, reinforcement learning algorithms to explain exploration, and Bayesian algorithms to explain…
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurological disorder characterized by amyloid accumulation and behavioral changes across preclinical and clinical stages. Although AD is currently incurable, emerging machine-learning (ML) approaches are facilitating novel insights into disease etiology and treatment…
Many animals use visual motion cues to track and pursue small, fast-moving prey or to track conspecifics. The pursuit of small visual targets is a hard problem and understanding the underlying neural circuits will inform similar studies in other animals and open avenues for bio-inspired robotics. In dragonflies and…
In surveying the rich reservoir of neuronal computations and brain functions, a natural question arises: what unified characteristics influence the diverse and heterogeneous dynamical states and computations in highly recurrent cortical networks? Seminal studies suggest that large-scale information processing results…
Noradrenaline (NA) is a ubiquitous neuromodulator largely produced by locus coeruleus (LC) neurons that impacts multiple cognitive processes. Non-invasive methods are used to track LC-NA activity. For instance, pupillometry is shown to be linked to arousal state, LC-NA, and other neuromodulator activity. However,…
A range of work has been done analyzing the effect of specific pruning rules on the dynamics of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with a given connectivity structure. However, a more comprehensive study that explains the effect of different, biologically plausible pruning rules across a variety of structures has yet to…
Ongoing neural activity unfolds over intrinsic timescales that vary widely across the brain. The increase in timescales along the sensory-transmodal cortical axis parallels the cortical hierarchy, while diversity of timescales within each area may reflect functional specialization of individual neurons. However,…
In volatile environments, humans and animals face different forms of uncertainty to which they must adapt to thrive. However, our understanding of the neural basis of this adaptation is incomplete, despite, for instance, long-standing arguments about its possible dependence on neuromodulation. Here, we take advantage…
Electrophysiological recordings capture signals from hundreds of neurons simultaneously, but isolating single-cell activity often requires manual curation due to limitations in spike- sorting algorithms. As dataset sizes grow, the time and expertise required for accurate and consistent human curation pose a major…
Hippocampal remapping describes the phenomenon of substantial reshuffling of the spatial preferences of hippocampal place cells in response to environmental changes. Disparate neural representations in different environments could reduce interference between competing memories, hence functionally supporting robust…