I present a personal account of the origin, development and future of a concept that appeared in this journal in 1984. The title was The Structure of Images. It became known as “scale space.”
A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-021-00869-7
The inhomogeneous Poisson point process is a common model for time series of discrete, stochastic events. When an event from a point process is detected, it may trigger a random dead time in the detector, during which subsequent events will fail to be detected. It can be difficult or impossible to obtain a closed-form expression for the distribution of intervals between...
The authors have identified a typesetting error in their representation of the frictional forces in the original version of this manuscript.
A key problem for biological motor control is to establish a link between an idea of a movement and the generation of a set of muscle-stimulating signals that lead to the movement execution. The number of signals to generate is thereby larger than the body’s mechanical degrees of freedom in which the idea of the movement may be easily expressed, as the movement is actually...
Trial-to-trial variability during visuomotor adaptation is usually explained as the result of two different sources, planning noise and execution noise. The estimation of the underlying variance parameters from observations involving varying feedback conditions cannot be achieved by standard techniques (Kalman filter) because they do not account for recursive noise propagation in...
All organisms must be able to adapt to changes in the environment. To this end, they have developed sophisticated regulatory mechanisms to ensure homeostasis. Control engineers, who must design similar regulatory systems, have developed a number of general principles that govern feedback regulation. These lead to constraints which impose trade-offs that arise when developing...
The free energy principle (FEP) in the neurosciences stipulates that all viable agents induce and minimize informational free energy in the brain to fit their environmental niche. In this study, we continue our effort to make the FEP a more physically principled formalism by implementing free energy minimization based on the principle of least action. We build a Bayesian...
In "Slow-fast control of eye movements: an instance of Zeeman’s model for an action," Clement and Akman extended Zeeman's model for the heartbeat to describe eye movement control of different species using aspects of catastrophe theory. The scientists created a model that gives an example of how the techniques of catastrophe theory can be used to understand information processing...
Spectral analysis and neural field theory are used to investigate the role of local connections in brain connectivity matrices (CMs) that quantify connectivity between pairs of discretized brain regions. This work investigates how the common procedure of omitting such self-connections (i.e., the diagonal elements of CMs) in published studies of brain connectivity affects the...
The rapid eye movements (saccades) used to transfer gaze between targets are examples of an action. The behaviour of saccades matches that of the slow–fast model of actions originally proposed by Zeeman. Here, we extend Zeeman’s model by incorporating an accumulator that represents the increase in certainty of the presence of a target, together with an integrator that converts a...
The semicircular ducts (SCDs) of the vestibular system play an instrumental role in equilibration and rotation perception of vertebrates. The present paper is a review of quantitative approaches and shows how SCDs function. It consists of three parts. First, the biophysical mechanisms of an SCD system composed of three mutually connected ducts, allowing endolymph to flow from one...
Decoding the direction of translating objects in front of cluttered moving backgrounds, accurately and efficiently, is still a challenging problem. In nature, lightweight and low-powered flying insects apply motion vision to detect a moving target in highly variable environments during flight, which are excellent paradigms to learn motion perception strategies. This paper...
Information about time-dependent sensory stimuli is encoded in the activity of neural populations; distinct aspects of the stimulus are read out by different types of neurons: while overall information is perceived by integrator cells, so-called coincidence detector cells are driven mainly by the synchronous activity in the population that encodes predominantly high-frequency...