Topic: neuronal responses

A major challenge in sensory systems is to understand how neurons extract information from the natural environment. Models derived from their responses to artificial stimuli often have a hard time to generalize and predict responses to natural scenes. However, models directly learned on the responses to natural scenes can be hard to interpret. To address this issue, we have recently developed an approach where we add small perturbations to natural scenes and measure how these perturbations change neuronal responses, to better understand the features extracted by sensory neurons. I will show se

Cells preferentially responding to visual motion in a particular direction are said to be direction-selective, and these were first identified in the primary visual cortex. Since then, direction-selective responses have been observed in the retina of several species, including mice, indicating motion analysis begins at the earliest stage of the visual hierarchy. Yet little is known about how retinal direction selectivity contributes to motion processing in the visual cortex. In this talk, I will present our experimental efforts to narrow this gap in our knowledge. To this end, we used genetic

Since the identification of concept cells nearly two decades ago [1], the semantic invariance of single neurons in the human medial temporal lobe has been extensively investigated [2, 3]. Such investigations typically consist of an initial screening to identify semantically-tuned neurons and a subsequent follow-up experiment which uses the identified stimulus-response pairings to address a particular question. While often examined in the service of other scientific investigations, the initial screenings have rarely been the sole focus of investigation [4]. Given the challenges endemic to human