B.D. Wright, K. Sen, W. Bialek and A.J. Doupe

Discovering features of natural stimuli relevant to songbird auditory neurons

University of California, San Francisco


One way to determine the features of sensory stimuli important to a neuron is to compute a spike-triggered average of some representation of the stimulus. In the case of the auditory system, one often constructs the spectro-temporal receptive field. However, this method produces only one average stimulus feature to which the neuron is sensitive, and describes at best the linear component of the stimulus-response relationship, while auditory neuron responses can be highly nonlinear. Here we apply and develop a method in which we use the neuronal response to extract, from a large stimulus space, multiple auditory features to which the cell is sensitive.

The method expands upon techniques first used in characterizing motion sensitive neurons in the blowfly. We compute the covariance matrix, C, of the stimulus in a window surrounding a spike and, to account for intrinsic correlations in our natural stimulus ensembles, a corresponding prior covariance matrix, C_prior, of the stimulus. If the neuron is sensitive to only a small number of stimulus dimensions or features, then C - C_prior will have mostly zero eigenvalues; eigenvectors associated with nonzero eigenvalues provide a low dimensional space of relevant stimulus features. We use this method to characterize the neuronal responses of cells in the auditory field L complex of the zebra finch, using stimuli consisting of recordings of birdsong. Preliminary results indicate that from a stimulus space with roughly 1000 dimensions, only a few are relevant to the response of neurons in field L. We explore these dimensions, using probabilistic and information theoretic techniques, to determine potentially nonlinear interactions among them.
Friday, March 29, 2024
About the Swartz Foundation...
 
The Swartz Foundation was established by Jerry Swartz (bio) in 1994 . . .
more>
 
Follow us...
 
The Swartz Foundation is on Twitter: SwartzCompNeuro
more>
 
 
2013 Stony Brook Mind/Brain Lecture - Michael Wigler, PhD
 
 
2012 Stony Brook Mind/Brain Lecture - John Donoghue
 
 
Sloan-Swartz Centers Annual Meeting 2011
 
 
2011 Stony Brook Mind/Brain Lecture - Allison J. Doupe
 
 
2011 Banbury Workshop
 
 
Sloan-Swartz Centers Annual Meeting 2010
 
 
2010 Stony Brook Mind/Brain Lecture
 
 
Sloan-Swartz Centers Annual Meeting 2009
 
 
Conference on Neural Dynamics
 
 
2009 Stony Brook Mind/Brain Lecture
 
 
Canonical Neural Computation, April 2009
 
 
2009 Banbury Workshop
 
 
Sloan-Swartz Centers Annual Meeting 2008
 
 
Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Auditory and Visual Attention - Banbury 2008
 
 
Stony Brook Mind/Brain 2008: Patricia Smith Churchland, B. Phil. D
 
 
Sloan-Swartz Centers Annual Meeting 2007
 
 
New Frontiers In Studies Of Nonconscious Processing - Banbury 2007
 
 
Stony Brook Mind/Brain 2007: Professor Michael Shadlen, MD, PhD
 
 
Multi-level Brain Modeling Workshop 2006
 
 
Sloan Swartz Centers Annual Meeting 2006
 
 
Banbury 2006: Computational Approaches to Cortical Functions
 
 
Stony Brook Mind/Brain 2006: Helen Fisher -- Lecture Videos
 
 
Sloan-Swartz Centers for Theoretical Neurobiology
 
 
Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience
 
 
Banbury Center Workshop Series
 
 
Other Events
 
www.theswartzfoundation.org                           Copyright © The Swartz Foundation 2024