Population responses

Sensory systems continuously adapt their responses based on the frequency of stimuli they encounter. Our goal is to develop a clear understanding of how populations of cortical neurons adapt to varying sensory environments. Recent experiments in the mouse primary visual cortex (V1) have shown a remarkable finding: the magnitude of population responses follows a power law with respect to stimulus frequency. This power law is universal, with the same exponent observed across different statistical environments, enabling predictions of population responses to new environments and allowing the brai

The relative timing of different sensory input signals is an important factor in multisensory integration and perception. When multiple forms of sensory stimuli arise from a single source, the degree of synchrony in the arrival of these stimuli can provide distance cues. The difference between the velocities of light and sound introduces a distance dependent lag for auditory signals with respect to visual information. Audio-visual delays therefore carry information about the distance to the stimulus source. Here we investigated the representation of audio-visual delays in the mouse superior co

…efficient code is not specific to a population of neurons with finely tuned response properties: it emerges robustly in a shallow network with random synapses. Here, the geometry of population resp

Neural responses are variable: even under identical experimental conditions, single neuron and population responses typically differ from trial to trial and across time. Recent work has demonstrated that this variability has predictable structure, can be modulated by sensory input and behaviour, and bears critical signatures of the underlying network dynamics and computations. However, current methods for characterising neural variability are primarily geared towards sensory coding in the laboratory: they require trials with repeatable experimental stimuli and behavioural covariates. In additi

In this lecture, I will present our recent progress on three aspects of population responses in the primary visual cortex: encoding local stimulus attributes, electrical microstimulation and higher visual function. In the first part I will focus on population encoding and reconstruction of contour shapes in V1 and the comparison between monkey and mouse visual responses. In the second part of the talk I will present the effects of microstimulation on neural population in V1 and the relation to evoked saccades. In the final part of the talk I will discuss top-down influences in V1 and their re