Topic: stimulus representations

Stimuli trigger a pattern of activity across neurons in cortex, whose firing rates define a stimulus's representation in a high-dimensional vector space. Learning a visuomotor task can affect the responses of visual cortical neurons, but how and why training modifies population-level representations is unclear. One hypothesis is that representational plasticity in visual cortex facilitates visuomotor associations by downstream motor systems. Learning systems exhibit "inductive biases", meaning they form some stimulus-motor associations more easily than others. An animal's inductive biases pr

Individual neurons exhibit a rich repertoire of complex dynamical patterns which vary at fast timescales [1]. Despite these fast temporal dynamics, neural circuits are able to maintain stimulus representations over the course of behaviorally relevant timescales that can subsequently be decoded by time-invariant downstream circuits to perform motor actions. Previous studies have proposed that these observations can co-exist due to neural redundancy. Specifically, these frameworks suggest that task relevant information is stably stored in a low dimensional subspace [2][3]. Moreover, time invaria