Mixed selectivity coding of sensory and motor social signals in the thalamus of a weakly electric fish.

High-level neural activity often exhibits mixed selectivity to multivariate signals. How such representations arise and modulate natural behavior is poorly understood. We addressed this question in weakly electric fish, whose social behavior is relatively low dimensional and can be easily reproduced in the laboratory.

Data-driven inference for stationary jump-diffusion processes with application to membrane voltage fluctuations in pyramidal neurons.

The emergent activity of biological systems can often be represented as low-dimensional, Langevin-type stochastic differential equations. In certain systems, however, large and abrupt events occur and violate the assumptions of this approach. We address this situation here by providing a novel method that reconstructs a jump-diffusion stochastic process based solely on the statistics of the original data.

Nonstationary Stochastic Dynamics Underlie Spontaneous Transitions between Active and Inactive Behavioral States.

The neural basis of spontaneous movement generation is a fascinating open question. Long-term monitoring of fish, swimming freely in a constant sensory environment, has revealed a sequence of behavioral states that alternate randomly and spontaneously between periods of activity and inactivity. We show that key dynamical features of this sequence are captured by a 1-D diffusion process evolving in a nonlinear double well energy landscape, in which a slow variable modulates the relative depth of the wells.