A couple of weeks ago I presented
A category-free neural population supports evolving demands during decision-making
by David Raposo, Matthew Kaufman and Anne Churchland. By “categories” they are referring to some population of cells whose responses during an experiment seem to be dominated by one or two of the experimental variables. The authors refer to these types of categories as functional categories.
In a recent lab meeting, I presented the following paper from Larry Abbott’s group:
From fixed points to chaos: Three models of delayed discrimination.
Barak, Sussillo, Romo, Tsodyks, & Abbott,
Progress. in Neurobiology 103:214-22 2013.
The paper seeks to connect the statistical properties of neurons in pre-frontal cortex (PFC) during short-term memory with those exhibited by several dynamical models for neural population responses. In a sense, it can be considered a follow-up to Christian Machens’ beautiful 2005 Science paper [2], which showed how a simple attractor model could support behavior in a two-interval discrimination task. The problem with the Machens/Brody/Romo account (which relied on mutual inhibition between two competing populations) is that it predicts extremely stereotyped response profiles, with all neurons in each population exhibiting the same profile. Continue reading
I (Memming) presented Eliasmith et al. “A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain” Science 2012 for our computational neuroscience journal club. The authors combined their past efforts for building various modules for solving cognitive tasks to build a large-scale spiking neuron model called SPAUN.
Pillow Lab Blog 