Publications by authors named "Heather L Cihak"
Article Synopsis
- Localized persistent neural activity encodes the ability to remember and estimate continuous variables over time, like the orientation of a visual cue.
- Previous research indicates that the position of these activity bumps in neural circuits represents the remembered value, while their amplitude may reflect confidence in that memory.
- The proposed model introduces quantized nonlinearities to better support varying bump amplitudes, revealing that more noticeable cues lead to more stable and stronger memory representations.
The distinct timescales of synaptic plasticity and neural activity dynamics play an important role in the brain's learning and memory systems. Activity-dependent plasticity reshapes neural circuit architecture, determining spontaneous and stimulus-encoding spatiotemporal patterns of neural activity. Neural activity bumps maintain short term memories of continuous parameter values, emerging in spatially-organized models with short term excitation and long-range inhibition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDistinct Excitatory and Inhibitory Bump Wandering in a Stochastic Neural Field.
SIAM J Appl Dyn Syst
December 2022
Localized persistent cortical neural activity is a validated neural substrate of parametric working memory. Such activity "bumps" represent the continuous location of a cue over several seconds. Pyramidal (excitatory ()) and interneuronal (inhibitory ()) subpopulations exhibit tuned bumps of activity, linking neural dynamics to behavioral inaccuracies observed in memory recall.
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