ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
Rats and mice use their whiskers to probe the environment. By rhythmically swiping their whiskers back and forth they can detect the existence of an object, locate it, and identify its texture. Localization can be accomplished by inferring the position of the whisker. Rhythmic neurons that track the phase of the whisking cycle encode information about the azimuthal location of the whisker. These neurons are characterized by preferred phases of firing that are narrowly distributed. Consequently, pooling the rhythmic signal from several upstream neurons is expected to result in a much narrower distribution of preferred phases in the downstream population, which however has not been observed empirically. Here, we show how spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) can provide a solution to this conundrum. We investigated the effect of STDP on the utility of a neural population to transmit rhythmic information downstream using the framework of a modeling study. We found that under a wide range of parameters, STDP facilitated the transfer of rhythmic information despite the fact that all the synaptic weights remained dynamic. As a result, the preferred phase of the downstream neuron was not fixed, but rather drifted in time at a drift velocity that depended on the preferred phase, thus inducing a distribution of preferred phases. We further analyzed how the STDP rule governs the distribution of preferred phases in the downstream population. This link between the STDP rule and the distribution of preferred phases constitutes a natural test for our theory.
We present a method to estimate Gibbs distributions with textit{spatio-temporal} constraints on spike trains statistics. We apply this method to spike trains recorded from ganglion cells of the salamander retina, in response to natural movies. Our an
White noise methods are a powerful tool for characterizing the computation performed by neural systems. These methods allow one to identify the feature or features that a neural system extracts from a complex input, and to determine how these feature
Given that many fundamental questions in neuroscience are still open, it seems pertinent to explore whether the brain might use other physical modalities than the ones that have been discovered so far. In particular it is well established that neuron
Data on the number of Open Reading Frames (ORFs) coded by genomes from the 3 domains of Life show some notable general features including essential differences between the Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes, with the number of ORFs growing linearly with tota
Humans face the task of balancing dynamic systems near an unstable equilibrium repeatedly throughout their lives. Much research has been aimed at understanding the mechanisms of intermittent control in the context of human balance control. The presen