24,538 research outputs found
The impact of spike timing variability on the signal-encoding performance of neural spiking models
It remains unclear whether the variability of neuronal spike trains in vivo arises due to biological noise sources or represents highly precise encoding of temporally varying synaptic input signals. Determining the variability of spike timing can provide fundamental insights into the nature of strategies used in the brain to represent and transmit information in the form of discrete spike trains. In this study, we employ a signal estimation paradigm to determine how variability in spike timing affects encoding of random time-varying signals. We assess this for two types of spiking models: an integrate-and-fire model with random threshold and a more biophysically realistic stochastic ion channel model. Using the coding fraction and mutual information as information-theoretic measures, we quantify the efficacy of optimal linear decoding of random inputs from the model outputs and study the relationship between efficacy and variability in the output spike train. Our findings suggest that variability does not necessarily hinder signal decoding for the biophysically plausible encoders examined and that the functional role of spiking variability depends intimately on the nature of the encoder and the signal processing task; variability can either enhance or impede decoding performance
Salience-based selection: attentional capture by distractors less salient than the target
Current accounts of attentional capture predict the most salient stimulus to be invariably selected first. However, existing salience and visual search models assume noise in the map computation or selection process. Consequently, they predict the first selection to be stochastically dependent on salience, implying that attention could even be captured first by the second most salient (instead of the most salient) stimulus in the field. Yet, capture by less salient distractors has not been reported and salience-based selection accounts claim that the distractor has to be more salient in order to capture attention. We tested this prediction using an empirical and modeling approach of the visual search distractor paradigm. For the empirical part, we manipulated salience of target and distractor parametrically and measured reaction time interference when a distractor was present compared to absent. Reaction time interference was strongly correlated with distractor salience relative to the target. Moreover, even distractors less salient than the target captured attention, as measured by reaction time interference and oculomotor capture. In the modeling part, we simulated first selection in the distractor paradigm using behavioral measures of salience and considering the time course of selection including noise. We were able to replicate the result pattern we obtained in the empirical part. We conclude that each salience value follows a specific selection time distribution and attentional capture occurs when the selection time distributions of target and distractor overlap. Hence, selection is stochastic in nature and attentional capture occurs with a certain probability depending on relative salience
Transfer Meets Hybrid: A Synthetic Approach for Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering with Text
Collaborative filtering (CF) is the key technique for recommender systems
(RSs). CF exploits user-item behavior interactions (e.g., clicks) only and
hence suffers from the data sparsity issue. One research thread is to integrate
auxiliary information such as product reviews and news titles, leading to
hybrid filtering methods. Another thread is to transfer knowledge from other
source domains such as improving the movie recommendation with the knowledge
from the book domain, leading to transfer learning methods. In real-world life,
no single service can satisfy a user's all information needs. Thus it motivates
us to exploit both auxiliary and source information for RSs in this paper. We
propose a novel neural model to smoothly enable Transfer Meeting Hybrid (TMH)
methods for cross-domain recommendation with unstructured text in an end-to-end
manner. TMH attentively extracts useful content from unstructured text via a
memory module and selectively transfers knowledge from a source domain via a
transfer network. On two real-world datasets, TMH shows better performance in
terms of three ranking metrics by comparing with various baselines. We conduct
thorough analyses to understand how the text content and transferred knowledge
help the proposed model.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, a full version for the WWW 2019 short pape
Stochastic Resonance in Ion Channels Characterized by Information Theory
We identify a unifying measure for stochastic resonance (SR) in voltage
dependent ion channels which comprises periodic (conventional), aperiodic and
nonstationary SR. Within a simplest setting, the gating dynamics is governed by
two-state conductance fluctuations, which switch at random time points between
two values. The corresponding continuous time point process is analyzed by
virtue of information theory. In pursuing this goal we evaluate for our
dynamics the tau-information, the mutual information and the rate of
information gain. As a main result we find an analytical formula for the rate
of information gain that solely involves the probability of the two channel
states and their noise averaged rates. For small voltage signals it simplifies
to a handy expression. Our findings are applied to study SR in a potassium
channel. We find that SR occurs only when the closed state is predominantly
dwelled. Upon increasing the probability for the open channel state the
application of an extra dose of noise monotonically deteriorates the rate of
information gain, i.e., no SR behavior occurs.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
- …