Category: Journal club
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Journal club express #1
I’m introducing a new (hopefully recurring) feature on the blog: the Journal Club express. Lengthy discussions of papers are quite time-consuming to write, so instead I’ll periodically highlight a few recent papers I’ve read that I think could be interesting to regular readers. There’s a new Neuron paper from John Maunsell’s lab that shows an…
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Using an iterated extended Kalman filter to decode place cells
Decoding neuronal activity is a powerful technique to study how information is encoded in a population and how it might be extracted by other brains areas. Hippocampal place cells are a prime example of a system that can be studied fruitfully from a decoding persepective. In a typical place cell decoding experiment, a population of…
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Natural vs. synthetic stimuli for estimating receptive fields
Is it better to use natural or synthetic stimuli to estimate receptive fields? Vargha Talebi & Curtis Baker (who’s on my committee btw) have a new paper out in J Neurosci suggesting that RFs estimated with natural images generalize better to other stimulus ensembles than white noise or flashed bar stimuli. They mapped area 18…
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What’s the maximal frame rate humans can perceive?
Gamers care a lot about framerate. Should they? [Photo credit: Betto Rodrigues / Shutterstock.com]
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Localized priors for receptive field estimation
New paper out in PLOS Comp Biology by Mijung Park and Jonathan Pillow on a spiffy new linear receptive field (RF) estimation method. The proposed method can be seen as an extension of state-of-the-art RF estimation methods that combine assumptions of smoothness and sparseness. The idea is to use what they call a localized prior.…
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Fat spikes, thin spikes
A lot of studies have popped recently that look at duration of spikes in an attempt to determine whether the measured neurons are inhibitory or excitatory. Thin (fast) spikes are identified with putative inhibitory interneurons, while thick (slow) spikes are identified with excitatory pyramidal cells. This is grounded in some physiological evidence, yet it still…
xcorr: AI & neuro 