Inferior temporal cortex (IT) neurons have large receptive fields when a single effective object stimulus is shown against a blank background, but have much smaller receptive fields when the object is placed in a natural scene. Thus, translation invariant object recognition is reduced in natural scenes, and this may help object selection. We describe a model which accounts for this by competition within an attractor in which the neurons are tuned to different objects in the scene, and the fovea has a higher cortical magnification factor than the peripheral visual field. Furthermore, weshow that top-down object bias can increase the receptive field size, facilitating object search in complex visual scenes, and providing a model of object-based attention. The model leads to the prediction that introduction of a second object into a scene with blank background will reduce the receptive field size to values that depend on the closeness of the second object to the target stimulus. We suggest that mechanisms of this type enable the output of IT to be primarily about one object, so that the areas that receive from IT can select the object as a potential target for action.

Hebbian learning rules are generally formulated as static rules.

Population codes often rely on the tuning of the mean responses to the stimulus parameters. However, this information can be greatly suppressed bylong range correlations. Here we study the efficiency of coding information in the second order statistics of the population responses. We show that the Fisher Information of this system grows linearly with the size of the system. We propose a bilinear readout model for extracting informationfrom correlation codes, and evaluate its performance in discrimination and estimation tasks. It is shown that the main source of information in this system is the stimulus dependence of the variances of the single neuron responses.

Neural activity appears to be a crucial component for shaping the receptive fieldsof cortical simple cells into adjacent, oriented subregions alternately receivingON-and OFFcenter excitatory geniculate inputs. It is known that the orientation selective responses of V1 neurons are refined by visual experience. After eye opening, the spatiotemporal structure of neural activity in the early stages of the visual pathway depends both on the visual environment and on how the environment is scanned. We have used computational modeling to investigate how eye movements might affect the refinement of the orientation tuning of simple cells in the presence ofa Hebbian scheme of synaptic plasticity. Levels of correlation between theactivity of simulated cells were examined while natural scenes were scanned so as to model sequences of saccades and fixational eye movements, such as microsaccades, tremor and ocular drift. The specific patterns of activity required for a quantitatively accurate development of simple cell receptive fields with segregated ON and OFF subregions were observed during fixational eye movements, but not in the presence of saccades or with static presentation of natural visual input.

We present an information-geometric measure to systematically investigate neuronal firing patterns, taking account not only of the second-order but also of higher-order interactions. We begin with the case of two neurons for illustration and show how to test whether or not any pairwise correlation in one period is significantly different from that in the other period. In order to test such a hypothesis ofdifferent firing rates, the correlation term needs to be singled out'orthogonally' to the firing rates, where the null hypothesis mightnot be of independent firing. This method is also shown to directly associate neural firing with behavior via their mutual information, which is decomposed into two types of information, conveyed by mean firing rate and coincident firing, respectively. Then, we show that these results, using the'orthogonal' decomposition, arenaturally extended to the case of three neurons and n neurons in general. 1 Introduction Based on the theory of hierarchical structure and related invariant decomposition of interactions by information geometry [3], the present paper briefly summarizes methods useful for systematically analyzing a population of neural firing [9].

Recent biological experimental findings have shown that the synaptic plasticitydepends on the relative timing of the pre-and postsynaptic spikeswhich determines whether Long Term Potentiation (LTP) occurs or Long Term Depression (LTD) does. The synaptic plasticity has been called "Temporally Asymmetric Hebbian plasticity (TAH)".Many authors have numerically shown that spatiotemporal patternscan be stored in neural networks.

Integration in the head-direction system is a computation by which horizontal angularhead velocity signals from the vestibular nuclei are integrated toyield a neural representation of head direction. In the thalamus, the postsubiculum and the mammillary nuclei, the head-direction representation has the form of a place code: neurons have a preferred head direction in which their firing is maximal [Blair and Sharp, 1995, Blair et al., 1998,?]. Integration is a difficult computation, given that head-velocities can vary over a large range. Previous models of the head-direction system relied on the assumption that the integration is achieved in a firing-rate-based attractor network with a ring structure. In order to correctly integrate head-velocity signals during high-speed head rotations, very fast synaptic dynamics had to be assumed. Here we address the question whether integration in the head-direction system is possible with slow synapses, for example excitatory NMDA and inhibitory GABA(B) type synapses. For neural networks with such slow synapses, rate-based dynamics are a good approximation of spiking neurons[Ermentrout, 1994]. We find that correct integration during high-speed head rotations imposes strong constraints on possible network architectures.

Statistical learning and probabilistic inference techniques are used to infer thehand position of a subject from multi-electrode recordings of neural activityin motor cortex. First, an array of electrodes provides training dataof neural firing conditioned on hand kinematics. We learn a nonparametric representationof this firing activity using a Bayesian model and rigorously compare it with previous models using cross-validation. Second, we infer a posterior probability distribution over hand motion conditioned on a sequence of neural test data using Bayesian inference. The learned firing models of multiple cells are used to define a non-Gaussian likelihood term which is combined with a prior probability for the kinematics. A particle filtering method is used to represent, update, and propagate the posterior distribution over time. The approach is compared withtraditional linear filtering methods; the results suggest that it may be appropriate for neural prosthetic applications.

The usual observable at the level of neuronal populations is the populationaveraged instantaneousfiring rate A(t), with A(t)6.t

Acetylcholine (ACh) has been implicated in a wide variety of tasks involving attentional processes and plasticity. Following extensive animal studies, it has previously been suggested that ACh reports on uncertainty and controls hippocampal, cortical and cortico-amygdalar plasticity. We extend this view and consider its effects on cortical representational inference, arguing that ACh controls the balance between bottom-up inference, influenced by input stimuli, and top-down inference, influenced by contextual information. We illustrate our proposal using a hierarchical hidden Markovmodel.