Topic: noise robustness

A central question in motor physiology has been whether motor cortex activity resembles muscle activity, and if not, why not? Over fifty years, extensive observations have failed to provide a concise answer, and the topic remains much debated. To provide a different perspective, we employed a novel behavioral paradigm that affords extensive comparison between time-evolving neural and muscle activity. Single motor-cortex neurons displayed many muscle-like properties, but the structure of population activity was not muscle-like. Unlike muscle activity, neural activity was structured to avoid ’tr

Contrary to typical artificial neural network (ANN) design, biological neurons are not identical. Neurons differ substantially in their physiological properties. Heterogeneity has been hypothesized to increase the dimensionality of the neural dynamics, which improves the encoding properties of a network [1], promotes robustness and stability [2], and maximizes information flow in large networks [3]. We aim to show the functional effect of heterogeneity in rate-based recurrent neural networks. To vary the degree of heterogeneity, we introduce neuron types, with each neuron type having its own