For being a polarized neuron and having a sensory cilium, photoreceptors attract remarkable attention. This is due their highly polarized structure and active visual signal transduction cascades and for the enrichment of complex networks of proteins in the cilium. Structural and functional maintenance of the photoreceptor sensory cilium, also called outer segment, ensures that light signal is r...

For a general sensory system following an external stochastic signal, we introduce the sensory capacity. This quantity characterizes the performance of a sensor: sensory capacity is maximal if the instantaneous state of the sensor has as much information about a signal as the whole time series of the sensor. We show that adding a memory to the sensor increases the sensory capacity. This increas...

A hypothesis regarding the development of imitation learning is presented that is rooted in intrinsic motivations. It is derived from a recently proposed form of intrinsically motivated learning (IML) for efficient coding in active perception, wherein an agent learns to perform actions with its sense organs to facilitate efficient encoding of the sensory data. To this end, actions of the sense ...