Advanced computer vision mechanisms have been inspired by neuroscientific findings. However, with the focus on improving benchmark achievements, technical solutions have been shaped by application and engineering constraints. This includes the training of neural networks which led to the development of feature detectors optimally suited to the application domain. However, the...
Mass-rearing procedures of insect species, often used in biological control and Sterile Insect Technique, can reduce the insects competitiveness in foraging, dispersal, and mating. The evocation of certain behaviours responsible to induce specific neuroendocrine products may restore or improve the competitiveness of mass-reared individuals. Herein, we used a mass-reared strain of...
Interest in unsupervised learning architectures has been rising. Besides being biologically unnatural, it is costly to depend on large labeled data sets to get a well-performing classification system. Therefore, both the deep learning community and the more biologically-inspired models community have focused on proposing unsupervised techniques that can produce adequate hidden...
The human motion perception system has long been linked to motion sickness through state estimation conflict terms. However, to date, the extent to which available perception models are able to predict motion sickness, or which of the employed perceptual mechanisms are of most relevance to sickness prediction, has not been studied. In this study, the subjective vertical model...
A planar stick balancing task was investigated using stabilometry parameters (SP); a concept initially developed to assess the stability of human postural sway. Two subject groups were investigated: 6 subjects (MD) with many days of balancing a 90 cm stick on a linear track and 25 subjects (OD) with only one day of balancing experience. The underlying mechanical model is a...
This article presents an overview of a theory for performing temporal smoothing on temporal signals in such a way that: (i) temporally smoothed signals at coarser temporal scales are guaranteed to constitute simplifications of corresponding temporally smoothed signals at any finer temporal scale (including the original signal) and (ii) the temporal smoothing process is both time...
Young infants are sensitive to whether their body movements cause subsequent events or not during the interaction with the environment. This ability has been revealed by empirical studies on the reinforcement of limb movements when a string is attached between an infant limb and a mobile toy suspended overhead. A previous study reproduced the experimental observation by modeling...
Neural mass models (NMMs) are designed to reproduce the collective dynamics of neuronal populations. A common framework for NMMs assumes heuristically that the output firing rate of a neural population can be described by a static nonlinear transfer function (NMM1). However, a recent exact mean-field theory for quadratic integrate-and-fire (QIF) neurons challenges this view by...
Motor systems show an overall robustness, but because they are highly nonlinear, understanding how they achieve robustness is difficult. In many rhythmic systems, robustness against perturbations involves response of both the shape and the timing of the trajectory. This makes the study of robustness even more challenging. To understand how a motor system produces robust behaviors...
Detecting small moving targets against a cluttered background in visual data is a challenging task. The main problems include spatio-temporal target contrast enhancement, background suppression and accurate target segmentation. When targets are at great distances from a non-stationary camera, the difficulty of these challenges increases. In such cases the moving camera can...
The visual systems of insects are relatively simple compared to humans. However, they enable navigation through complex environments where insects perform exceptional levels of obstacle avoidance. Biology uses two separable modes of optic flow to achieve this: rapid gaze fixation (rotational motion known as saccades); and the inter-saccadic translational motion. While the...
Negative correlations in the sequential evolution of interspike intervals (ISIs) are a signature of memory in neuronal spike-trains. They provide coding benefits including firing-rate stabilization, improved detectability of weak sensory signals, and enhanced transmission of information by improving signal-to-noise ratio. Primary electrosensory afferent spike-trains in weakly...
Fifty years ago, Wilson and Cowan developed a mathematical model to describe the activity of neural populations. In this seminal work, they divided the cells in three groups: active, sensitive and refractory, and obtained a dynamical system to describe the evolution of the average firing rates of the populations. In the present work, we investigate the impact of the often...
In Bourlard and Kamp (Biol Cybern 59(4):291–294, 1998), it was theoretically proven that autoencoders (AE) with single hidden layer (previously called “auto-associative multilayer perceptrons”) were, in the best case, implementing singular value decomposition (SVD) Golub and Reinsch (Linear algebra, Singular value decomposition and least squares solutions, pp 134–151. Springer...
Adaptation, the reduction of neuronal responses by repetitive stimulation, is a ubiquitous feature of auditory cortex (AC). It is not clear what causes adaptation, but short-term synaptic depression (STSD) is a potential candidate for the underlying mechanism. In such a case, adaptation can be directly linked with the way AC produces context-sensitive responses such as mismatch...
Experimental and theoretical studies have shown that ephaptic coupling leads to the synchronisation and slowing down of spikes propagating along the axons within peripheral nerve bundles. However, the main focus thus far has been on a small number of identical axons, whereas realistic peripheral nerve bundles contain numerous axons with different diameters. Here, we present a...
Retrieval of episodic memories requires intrinsic reactivation of neuronal activity patterns. The content of the memories is thereby assumed to be stored in synaptic connections. This paper proposes a theory in which these are the synaptic connections that specifically convey the temporal order information contained in the sequences of a neuronal reservoir to the sensory-motor...
Seminal work by A. Winfree and J. Guckenheimer showed that a deterministic phase variable can be defined either in terms of Poincaré sections or in terms of the asymptotic (long-time) behaviour of trajectories approaching a stable limit cycle. However, this equivalence between the deterministic notions of phase is broken in the presence of noise. Different notions of phase...
Models of associative memory with discrete state synapses learn new memories by forgetting old ones. In the simplest models, memories are forgotten exponentially quickly. Sparse population coding ameliorates this problem, as do complex models of synaptic plasticity that posit internal synaptic states, giving rise to synaptic metaplasticity. We examine memory lifetimes in both...
Stochastic oscillations can be characterized by a corresponding point process; this is a common practice in computational neuroscience, where oscillations of the membrane voltage under the influence of noise are often analyzed in terms of the interspike interval statistics, specifically the distribution and correlation of intervals between subsequent threshold-crossing times...