Neural encoding

The goal of behavioral neuroscience is to understand the relationship between neural activity and behavior. One traditional approach for studying this relationship has been to build models that either translate from the neural activity to behavior (decoding) or from behavior to neural activity (encoding). Recent advances in self-supervised learning now allow for modeling both modalities jointly. In this work, we introduce a multimodal masked modeling approach that masks portions of both behavior and neural activity, using the unmasked data to make predictions across both modalities. We evaluat

To date, most studies of neural representation have focused on how a single stimulus is encoded in the spiking activity of neurons. Consequently, little is known about how sensory neurons can preserve information from multiple stimuli – a problem given that many sensory neurons have relatively broad receptive fields. Multiplexing is a neural encoding theory that posits that neurons temporally switch between encoding various stimuli when more than one stimulus is present. To date, the strongest statistical evidence for this theory comes from spike counts measured over long time windows, leading

For many animals, color vision is important for survival, contributing to critical behaviors such as identifying food, detecting predators, and recognizing mates. How colors are processed in the central nervous system of di- and trichromatic vertebrate species (2-3 color cones) has been a topic of considerable research over the last decades. In contrast, the neuronal circuits supporting color vision in tetrachromatic vertebrates (4 color cones), such as birds, remain poorly understood. Through a combination of display engineering, large-scale Neuropixels recordings, and computational methods,

…geometry in gaining insights into the neural encoding of natural odorants. This is due to the exponential growth of the hyperbolic space, that makes it appropriate to encode hierarchical data. We employ a contrastive learning approach over the Poincare ball in order to embed olfacto

The sensory content and temporal structure of stimuli consistently bias the percept of duration. Previous studies revealed that intervals filled with continuous sensory input are perceived as longer compared to stimuli only marked at their onset and offset, a phenomenon referred to as 'filled duration illusion'. It remains unclear whether these distinct stimulus formats are measured by a common timing mechanism. In our study, we aimed to examine potential differences in the EEG correlates of temporal processing for filled, flanked and empty stimuli. We tested participants in a temporal reprodu

…the current study is to decipher the neural mechanisms underlying impaired speech and language processing in autism. Using a linear neural encoding framework, we analyzed the temporal response function (TRF) to continuous audiovisual speech stimulation at different levels of the speech processing hierarchy, ranging from acoustic to phonetic, to understand the stages at which information processing breaks down in individuals with ASD. We recorded high-density electroph

…sensitivity is related to the atypical neural encoding of rhythm patterns in speech by the brain. I will describe our recent data from infa

…Here we examined behavioral and neural activity of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) performing a two-options risky choice task in which offers occurred in sequence, each followed by a long (600 ms) blank screen delay period. As expected, we found that subjects allocated their gaze towards offer presentation locations and spent more time looking at most valuable offers; after factoring out value, we found that more