Topic: VVTNS

To understand subjective evaluation of an option, various disciplines have quantified the interaction between reward and effort during decision making, producing an estimate of economic utility, namely the subject ‘goodness’ of an option. However, those same variables that affect the utility of an option also influence the vigor (speed) of movements to acquire it. To better understand this, we have developed a mathematical framework demonstrating how utility can influence not only the choice of what to do, but also the speed of the movement follows. I will present results demonstrating that ex

Much as Santiago Ramón y Cajal is the godfather of neuronal computation, which occurs among neurons that communicate predominantly via threshold logic, Camillo Golgi is the inadvertent godfather of neurovascular signaling, in which the endothelial cells that form the lumen of blood vessels communicate via electrodiffusion as well as threshold logic. I will address questions that define spatiotemporal patterns of constriction and dilation that develop across the network of cortical vasculature: First - is there a common topology and geometry of brain vasculature (our work)? Second - what mechan

The traditional view of a neuron as a feature detector or an efficient encoder has difficulties in explaining the function of motor neurons and experimentally observed variable and context-dependent response properties of neurons. We put forward an alternative perspective, modeling each neuron as a feedback controller within a closed loop that includes other neurons and the external environment. Based on the recently developed Direct Data-Driven Control (DD-DC) approach, we propose a biologically plausible controller which implicitly identifies the dynamics of the rest of the loop, infers its

One of the fundamental functions of the brain is to flexibly plan and control movement production at different timescales in order to efficiently shape structured behaviors. I will present research investigating how these complex computations are performed in the mammalian brain, with an emphasis on autonomous motor control. Specifically, I will focus on the mechanisms supporting efficient interfacing between 'higher-level' planning commands and 'lower-level' motor cortical dynamics that ultimately drive muscles. I will take advantage of the fact that the anatomy of the circuits underlying mot

Carl van Vreeswijk (1962-2022) Carl van Vreeswijk passed away on the 13th of April, 2022, in Paris, as he was getting ready to go to the lab for the WWTNS of the week. Carl was an exceptionally gifted theoretical neuroscientist. With his deep understanding of theoretical tools, his curiosity and collaborations with experimentalists, he introduced and developed many pioneering concepts and techniques which have shaped our current understanding of recurrent neuronal networks and cortical dynamics. Beyond his prolific scientific wisdom and creativity, Carl was an inspiration to many, a generou

To act effectively and flexibly in an imperfectly predictable environment with only incomplete and unreliable sensory information, animals must learn to form and compute with internal representations that reflect their necessarily uncertain beliefs about the state of the world. The optimal approach to handling uncertainty is rooted in Bayesian probability, and indeed humans and other animals often approach Bayes optimality with a degree of robustness and flexibility that continues to evade artificial systems. However, the question of how neural circuits organise to achieve this performance r

Waves and patterns in the brain are well known to subserve natural computation. Much attention in the theoretical neuroscience community has been devoted to analysing networks of relatively simple spiking neurons (IF type) or firing rate models (Wilson-Cowan type) and to great effect! Indeed, the understanding of how spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity may arise in the cortex has advanced significantly with the development and analysis of such models. To replicate this success for sub-cortical tissues requires an extension to include relevant ionic currents that can further shape firi

Threshold-linear networks (TLNs) are popular firing rate models of recurrent networks. They have been used to model associative memory, decision-making, and position coding in cortical and hippocampal networks. Unlike rate models with other choices of nonlinearity, TLNs are piecewise linear, making them more amenable to mathematical analysis. In this talk I will present ten theorems about TLNs from the past five years. Many of these theorems connect the fixed points of a network to the structure of an underlying connectivity graph. These results have enabled us to develop graph rules to predic

(1) We (Grace Lindsay) used convolutional neural nets to model attention, by scaling the input/output function of neurons in an imagenet-trained network according to their selectivity for the feature or object category being attended. While this was effective in improving performance on difficult tasks, it was far less effective in earlier than in later layers. This indicated that neurons selective for a feature in earlier layers did not necessarily drive neurons selective for that feature in later layers. In contrast, applying attention according to the gradient for improving task performance

The ability to simultaneously record the activity from tens to thousands to tens of thousands of neurons has allowed us to analyze the computational role of population activity as opposed to single neuron activity. Recent work on a variety of cortical areas suggests that neural function may be built on the activation of population-wide activity patterns, the neural modes, rather than on the independent modulation of individual neural activity. These neural modes, the dominant covariation patterns within the neural population, define a low dimensional neural manifold that captures most of the v

Classic studies show that in many species – from leech and cricket to primate – responses of neural populations can be quite successfully read out using a measure neural population activity termed the population vector. However, despite its successes, detailed analyses have shown that the standard population vector discards substantial amounts of information contained in the responses of a neural population, and so is unlikely to accurately describe how signal communication between parts of the nervous system. I will describe recent theoretical results showing how to modify the population vect

Learning a new skill requires assimilating into our brain the regularities of the external world and how our body interacts with them as we engage in this skill. Trained Recurrent Neural Networks (TRNNs) are increasingly used as models of neural circuits of animals that were trained in laboratory setups, but the learning process itself has received less attention. Furthermore, most use of TRNNs is of a heuristic, rather than theory-based, nature, leaving many open questions: Which tasks yield to this approach and why? How do initial network architecture and learning rules bias the resultant ne