Persistent firing in response to a brief stimulus is a neural correlate of short-term memory in a variety of systems. In the oculomotor neural integrator, persistent firing that encodes eye position is maintained in response to transient saccadic eye-velocity commands. To a first approximation, firing rates in the integrator vary linearly with eye position. Thus, viewed across many cells, the p...

Processing complex sensory environments efficiently requires a diverse array of neural coding strategies. Neural codes relying on specific temporal patterning of action potentials may offer advantages over using solely spike rate codes. In particular, stimulus-dependent burst firing may carry additional information that isolated spikes do not. We use the well characterized electrosensory system...

I discuss the principle that bridges neural firing and perception. I start from the assumption that in order to understand perception, the state of neural firing in the brain is necessary and sufficient (the neuron doctrine in perception). I argue that the concept of response selectivity, currently the de facto central dogma in explaining the relation between neural firing and the brain, is inc...

The neural representation of sound azimuth in auditory cortex most often is considered to be average firing rate, and azimuth tuning curves based thereupon appear to be rather broad. Coincident firings of simultaneously recorded neurons could provide an improved representation of sound azimuth compared with that contained in the firing rate in either of the units. In the present study, a compar...

This experiment explored the relationship between neural firing patterns in second somatosensory cortex (SII) and decisions about roughness of tactile gratings. Neural and behavioral data were acquired while monkeys made dichotomous roughness classifications of pairs of gratings that differed in groove width (1.07 vs. 1.90 and 1.42 vs. 2.53 mm). A computer-controlled device delivered the gratin...

This paper introduces and summarizes recent work on probabilistic models of motor cortical activity and methods for inferring, or decoding, hand movements from this activity. A simple generalization of previous encoding models is presented in which neural firing rates are represented as a linear function of hand movements. A Bayesian approach is taken to exploit this generative model of firing ...

We created a neural architecture that can use two different types of information encoding strategies depending on the environment. The goal of this research was to create a simulated agent that could react to two different overlapping chemicals having varying concentrations. The neural network controls the agent by encoding its sensory information as temporal coincidences in a low concentration...

I discuss the principle that bridges neural firing and perception. I start from the assumption that in order to understand perception, the state of neural firing in the brain is necessary and sufficient (the neuron doctrine in perception). I argue that the concept of response selectivity, currently the de facto central dogma in explaining the relation between neural firing and the brain, is inc...

Patterns of neural firing can be viewed as a binary code with each neuron as a bit, with neurons which actively fire in response to a stimulus associated to a 1 and those which do not fire associated to a 0. In previous work, Curto et al. demonstrate that by studying the neural code as a ring, information can be recovered about the ways the regions over which the different neurons fire intersec...