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SUMMARY:LCN Seminar: Structure of spontaneous activity in rodent sensory c
 ortex
DTSTART:20131003T133000
DTSTAMP:20260501T075043Z
UID:05a8e3e1c24a59c2fd4f6674b227fbe90af79af69d575155ba6d1602
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Michael OKUN\, Systems and Computational Neuroscience\, Univer
 sity College London\nOn different trials identical sensory stimuli elicit 
 distinct neuronal responses. Furthermore\, even in the absence of sensory 
 stimuli the cortex produces unpredictable but structured spontaneous activ
 ity that in many ways resembles sensory responses. According to a fascinat
 ing recent hypothesis\, these are hallmarks of sampling-based representati
 on used by the cortex to perform sensory inference computations (Berkes et
  al.\, Science 2011). In the first part of the talk I will present a diffe
 rent interpretation of the currently existing evidence of sampling-based r
 epresentation. The central concept in our alternative explanation is popul
 ation rate dynamics\, i.e.\, the propensity of nearby cortical neurons to 
 change their firing rate in a coordinated manner. In the second part I wil
 l describe how the spiking of individual neurons correlates with the popul
 ation rate signal. We find that in the spontaneous activity the magnitude 
 of this correlation is highly heterogeneous even across neighboring neuron
 s.\nSimulations of random networks of spiking integrate-and-fire neurons s
 uggest several possible mechanisms for the heterogeneity observed in the e
 lectrophysiological recordings.
LOCATION:SG0213 http://plan.epfl.ch/?room=sg0213
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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