Topic: population representations

Humans have a remarkable ability to remember whether they've seen an image before, with considerable visual detail. Unlike the visual perceptual confusions of images, visual memory confusions are not approximately predicted by the distances between population representations in inferotemporal cortex (ITC), or its analogs in artificial neural networks. The leading hypothesis to account for this discrepancy proposes that the hippocampus (HC) applies a nonlinear transformation of its cortical inputs to better separate them before memory storage, a mechanism called hippocampal pattern separation (

The computational principles driving the transformation of sound information throughout the auditory system remains an intense subject of research. Here, we used large-scale samples of neuronal activity from the auditory cortex, thalamus and inferior colliculus in mice and from a detailed cochlea model to identify key transformations of population representations of simple, short (~500ms) time-varying sounds in the auditory pathway. Using noise-corrected metrics, we measured the similarity of evoked population patterns across sounds. In subcortical regions, this measure shows that the full tem