Topic: gain and sparsity

The ability to associate sensory stimuli (e.g., apples and cookies) with abstract knowledge (e.g., “healthy” versus “unhealthy”) is critical for survival. How are these associations implemented in the brain? And what governs how neural activity changes during abstract knowledge acquisition? To investigate these questions, we consider a circuit model that learns to map sensory stimuli into abstract categories via gradient-descent plasticity. We focus on typical neuroscience tasks (simple, and context-dependent categorization), and use simulations and mathematical analysis to uncover how neural