9,772 research outputs found
Locally embedded presages of global network bursts
Spontaneous, synchronous bursting of neural population is a widely observed
phenomenon in nervous networks, which is considered important for functions and
dysfunctions of the brain. However, how the global synchrony across a large
number of neurons emerges from an initially non-bursting network state is not
fully understood. In this study, we develop a new state-space reconstruction
method combined with high-resolution recordings of cultured neurons. This
method extracts deterministic signatures of upcoming global bursts in "local"
dynamics of individual neurons during non-bursting periods. We find that local
information within a single-cell time series can compare with or even
outperform the global mean field activity for predicting future global bursts.
Moreover, the inter-cell variability in the burst predictability is found to
reflect the network structure realized in the non-bursting periods. These
findings demonstrate the deterministic mechanisms underlying the locally
concentrated early-warnings of the global state transition in self-organized
networks
Neural system identification for large populations separating "what" and "where"
Neuroscientists classify neurons into different types that perform similar
computations at different locations in the visual field. Traditional methods
for neural system identification do not capitalize on this separation of 'what'
and 'where'. Learning deep convolutional feature spaces that are shared among
many neurons provides an exciting path forward, but the architectural design
needs to account for data limitations: While new experimental techniques enable
recordings from thousands of neurons, experimental time is limited so that one
can sample only a small fraction of each neuron's response space. Here, we show
that a major bottleneck for fitting convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to
neural data is the estimation of the individual receptive field locations, a
problem that has been scratched only at the surface thus far. We propose a CNN
architecture with a sparse readout layer factorizing the spatial (where) and
feature (what) dimensions. Our network scales well to thousands of neurons and
short recordings and can be trained end-to-end. We evaluate this architecture
on ground-truth data to explore the challenges and limitations of CNN-based
system identification. Moreover, we show that our network model outperforms
current state-of-the art system identification models of mouse primary visual
cortex.Comment: NIPS 201
Self-wiring in neural nets of point-like cortical neurons fails to reproduce cytoarchitectural differences
We propose a model for description of activity-dependent evolution and
self-wiring between binary neurons. Specifically, this model can be used for
investigation of growth of neuronal connectivity in the developing neocortex.
By using computational simulations with appropriate training pattern sequences,
we show that long-term memory can be encoded in neuronal connectivity and that
the external stimulations form part of the functioning neocortical circuit. It
is proposed that such binary neuron representations of point-like cortical
neurons fail to reproduce cytoarchitectural differences of the neocortical
organization, which has implications for inadequacies of compartmental models.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure
State-Dependent Computation Using Coupled Recurrent Networks
Although conditional branching between possible behavioral states is a hallmark of intelligent behavior, very little is known about the neuronal mechanisms that support this processing. In a step toward solving this problem, we demonstrate by theoretical analysis and simulation how
networks of richly interconnected neurons, such as those observed in the superficial layers of the neocortex, can embed reliable, robust finite state machines. We show how a multistable neuronal network containing a number of states can be created very simply by coupling two recurrent
networks whose synaptic weights have been configured for soft winner-take-all (sWTA) performance. These two sWTAs have simple, homogeneous, locally recurrent connectivity except for a small fraction of recurrent cross-connections between them, which are used to embed the required states. This coupling between the maps allows the network to continue to express the current state even after the input that elicited that state iswithdrawn. In addition, a small number of transition neurons implement the necessary input-driven transitions between the embedded states. We provide simple rules to systematically design and construct neuronal state machines of this kind. The significance of our finding is that it offers a method whereby the cortex could construct networks supporting a broad range of sophisticated processing by applying only small specializations to the same generic neuronal circuit
Searching for collective behavior in a network of real neurons
Maximum entropy models are the least structured probability distributions
that exactly reproduce a chosen set of statistics measured in an interacting
network. Here we use this principle to construct probabilistic models which
describe the correlated spiking activity of populations of up to 120 neurons in
the salamander retina as it responds to natural movies. Already in groups as
small as 10 neurons, interactions between spikes can no longer be regarded as
small perturbations in an otherwise independent system; for 40 or more neurons
pairwise interactions need to be supplemented by a global interaction that
controls the distribution of synchrony in the population. Here we show that
such "K-pairwise" models--being systematic extensions of the previously used
pairwise Ising models--provide an excellent account of the data. We explore the
properties of the neural vocabulary by: 1) estimating its entropy, which
constrains the population's capacity to represent visual information; 2)
classifying activity patterns into a small set of metastable collective modes;
3) showing that the neural codeword ensembles are extremely inhomogenous; 4)
demonstrating that the state of individual neurons is highly predictable from
the rest of the population, allowing the capacity for error correction.Comment: 24 pages, 19 figure
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