Topic: multidimensional scaling

A quantitative characterization of brain-wide activity imposes strong constraints on mechanistic models that link neural circuit connectivity, brain dynamics, and behavior. Here, we analyze whole-brain calcium activity in larval zebrafish captured by fast light-field volumetric imaging during hunting behavior. We found that the brain-wide activity is distributed across many principal component dimensions described by the covariance spectrum. Intriguingly, this spectrum shows an invariance to spatial subsampling. That is, the distribution of eigenvalues of a smaller and randomly sampled cell as

Motion detection is a fundamental task for the visual system, with cells as early as the retina showing selectivity to specific directions of motion. These cells typically have localized connectivity and receptive fields. Why not pool information from locations that are far apart to improve motion sensing? Here we provide a normative model that relates the lack of distant connections in motion-sensitive cells to the statistics of natural videos, which exhibit localized patterns undergoing localized motion. These local motions largely conserve contrast in a visual scene, allowing us to treat t