Topic: Natural movies

During the course of evolution, a species’ environment shapes its sensory abilities, as individuals with more optimized sensory abilities are more likely survive and procreate. Adaptations to the statistics of the natural environment can be observed along the early visual pathway and across species. Therefore, characterising the properties of natural environments and studying the representation of natural scenes along the visual pathway is crucial for advancing our understanding of the structure and function of the visual system. In the past 20 years, mice have become an important model in vis

Characterizing feature selectivities of sensory visual neurons is crucial for understanding how the brain forms representations of the external world. In vivo neurophysiological experiments aimed at identifying such tuning properties are constrained by time, making exhaustive searches in stimulus space infeasible. In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have set new standards in predicting neuronal responses of the visual system to arbitrary stimuli, making in silico exploration of the stimulus-response space possible. As visual input is dynamic, there is a need for models that can faithf

Information in the nervous system is encoded by the spiking patterns of large populations of neurons. The analysis of such high-dimensional data is typically restricted to simple, arbitrarily defined features like spike rates, which discards information in the temporal structure of spike trains. Here, we use a recently developed method called SpikeShip based on optimal transport theory, which captures information from all the relative spike-timing relations among neurons. We compared spike-rate and spike-timing codes in neural ensembles from six visual areas during natural video presentations.

It is appealing to disclose the state of an animal as well as the functional connectivity of its neuronal circuit by calculating pairwise and higher-order interactions (HOI) among neuronal activity. Here, we present a systematic approach to achieve these goals by analysing the spiking activity of simultaneously recorded neurons. To this end, we first developed a method to extract significant pairwise and triple-wise interactions among neurons. Using statistically significant data, we then analysed pairwise and HOI from large-scale spiking activities in visual areas of mice during natural movie