Filling-in is a perceptual phenomenon in which a visual attribute such as colour, brightness, texture or motion is perceived in a region of the visual field even though such an attribute exists only in the surround. Filling-in dramatically reveals the dissociation between the retinal input and the percept, and raises fundamental questions about how these two relate to each other. Filling-in is observed in various situations, and is an essential part of our normal surface perception. Here, I review recent experiments examining brain activities associated with filling-in, and discuss possible neural mechanisms underlying this remarkable perceptual phenomenon. The evidence shows that neuronal activities in early visual cortical areas are involved in filling-in, providing new insights into visual cortical functions.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrn1869 | DOI Listing |
PLoS Comput Biol
January 2025
Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel.
Theoretical neuroscientists and machine learning researchers have proposed a variety of learning rules to enable artificial neural networks to effectively perform both supervised and unsupervised learning tasks. It is not always clear, however, how these theoretically-derived rules relate to biological mechanisms of plasticity in the brain, or how these different rules might be mechanistically implemented in different contexts and brain regions. This study shows that the calcium control hypothesis, which relates synaptic plasticity in the brain to the calcium concentration ([Ca2+]) in dendritic spines, can produce a diverse array of learning rules.
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January 2025
Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States.
Stem cell differentiation involves a global increase in protein synthesis to meet the demands of specialized cell types. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying this translational burst and the involvement of initiation factors remains largely unknown. Here, we investigate the role of eukaryotic initiation factor 3 (eIF3) in early differentiation of human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived neural progenitor cells (NPCs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Rev Lett
December 2024
University of Strathclyde, Institute of Photonics, SUPA Dept of Physics, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
We report a spiking flip-flop memory mechanism that allows controllably switching between neural-like excitable spike-firing and quiescent dynamics in a resonant tunneling diode (RTD) neuron under low-amplitude (<150 mV pulses) and high-speed (ns rate) inputs pulses. We also show that the timing of the set-reset input pulses is critical to elicit switching responses between spiking and quiescent regimes in the system. The demonstrated flip-flop spiking memory, in which spiking regimes can be controllably excited, stored, and inhibited in RTD neurons via specific low-amplitude, high-speed signals (delivered at proper time instants) offers high promise for RTD-based spiking neural networks, with the potential to be extended further to optoelectronic implementations where RTD neurons and RTD memory elements are deployed alongside for fast and efficient photonic-electronic neuromorphic computing and artificial intelligence hardware.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBioinformatics
January 2025
Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States.
Motivation: The accurate prediction of O-GlcNAcylation sites is crucial for understanding disease mechanisms and developing effective treatments. Previous machine learning models primarily relied on primary or secondary protein structural and related properties, which have limitations in capturing the spatial interactions of neighboring amino acids. This study introduces local environmental features as a novel approach that incorporates three-dimensional spatial information, significantly improving model performance by considering the spatial context around the target site.
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January 2025
Department of Cognitive Psychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
When retrieved, seemingly stable memories can become sensitive to significant events, such as acute stress. The mechanisms underlying these memory dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we show that noradrenergic stimulation after memory retrieval impairs subsequent remembering, depending on hippocampal and cortical signals emerging during retrieval.
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