Bayesian optimization generates personalized face stimuli for cognitive neuroscience.
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Here, we present a novel approach to solve the problem of reconstructing perceived stimuli from brain responses by combining probabilistic inference with deep learning. Our approach first inverts the linear transformation from latent features to brain responses with maximum a posteriori estimation and then inverts the …
A recent Cell paper [Chang and Tsao, 2017] reports an interesting discovery. For the face stimuli generated by a pre-trained active appearance model (AAM), the responses of neurons in the areas of the primate brain that are responsible for face recognition exhibit strong linear relationship with the shape variables and…
Experiments that study neural encoding of stimuli at the level of individual neurons typically choose a small set of features present in the world --- contrast and luminance for vision, pitch and intensity for sound --- and assemble a stimulus set that systematically varies along these dimensions. Subsequent analysis o…
New method decomposes sensory information from neurons into specific stimuli and features.
The human brain is able to learn, generalize, and predict crossmodal stimuli. Learning by expectation fine-tunes crossmodal processing at different levels, thus enhancing our power of generalization and adaptation in highly dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose a deep neural architecture trained by using expe…
Plants sense their environment by producing electrical signals which in essence represent changes in underlying physiological processes. These electrical signals, when monitored, show both stochastic and deterministic dynamics. In this paper, we compute 11 statistical features from the raw non-stationary plant electric…
Neuroimaging studies produce gigabytes of spatio-temporal data for a small number of participants and stimuli. Rarely do researchers attempt to model and examine how individual participants vary from each other -- a question that should be addressable even in small samples given the right statistical tools. We propose …
This paper suggests a learning-theoretic perspective on how synaptic plasticity benefits global brain functioning. We introduce a model, the selectron, that (i) arises as the fast time constant limit of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons equipped with spiking timing dependent plasticity (STDP) and (ii) is amenable to the…
The visual systems of many mammals, including humans, is able to integrate the geometric information of visual stimuli and to perform cognitive tasks already at the first stages of the cortical processing. This is thought to be the result of a combination of mechanisms, which include feature extraction at single cell l…
This work synthesizes realistic data from neural excitation patterns to anonymize private data.
The cognitive framework of conceptual spaces proposes to represent concepts as regions in psychological similarity spaces. These similarity spaces are typically obtained through multidimensional scaling (MDS), which converts human dissimilarity ratings for a fixed set of stimuli into a spatial representation. One can d…
Background: A universal unanswered question in neuroscience and machine learning is whether computers can decode the patterns of the human brain. Multi-Voxels Pattern Analysis (MVPA) is a critical tool for addressing this question. However, there are two challenges in the previous MVPA methods, which include decreasing…
A universal unanswered question in neuroscience and machine learning is whether computers can decode the patterns of the human brain. Multi-Voxels Pattern Analysis (MVPA) is a critical tool for addressing this question. However, there are two challenges in the previous MVPA methods, which include decreasing sparsity an…
Derives a biologically plausible neural network for Slow Feature Analysis.
A neuroscience method to understanding the brain is to find and study the preferred stimuli that highly activate an individual cell or groups of cells. Recent advances in machine learning enable a family of methods to synthesize preferred stimuli that cause a neuron in an artificial or biological brain to fire strongly…
Relational learning can be used to augment one data source with other correlated sources of information, to improve predictive accuracy. We frame a large class of relational learning problems as matrix factorization problems, and propose a hierarchical Bayesian model. Training our Bayesian model using random-walk Metro…
The superior temporal gyrus (STG) region of cortex critically contributes to speech recognition. In this work, we show that a proposed WaveNet, with limited available data, is able to reconstruct speech stimuli from STG intracranial recordings. We further investigate the impulse response of the fitted model for each re…
Every living organism struggles against disruptive environmental forces to carve out and maintain an orderly niche. We propose that such a struggle to achieve and preserve order might offer a principle for the emergence of useful behaviors in artificial agents. We formalize this idea into an unsupervised reinforcement …
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification can map different cognitive states to the brain tasks. One of the main challenges in MVP analysis is validating the generated results across subjects. However, analyzing multi-subject fMRI data requires accurate functional alignments between neuronal activities of different sub…
The cognitive framework of conceptual spaces bridges the gap between symbolic and subsymbolic AI by proposing an intermediate conceptual layer where knowledge is represented geometrically. There are two main approaches for obtaining the dimensions of this conceptual similarity space: using similarity ratings from psych…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) transform stimuli across multiple processing stages to produce representations that can be used to solve complex tasks, such as object recognition in images. However, a full understanding of how they achieve this remains elusive. The complexity of biological neural networks substantially exc…
fMRI semantic category understanding using linguistic encoding models attempts to learn a forward mapping that relates stimuli to the corresponding brain activation. State-of-the-art encoding models use a single global model (linear or non-linear) to predict brain activation given the stimulus. However, the critical as…
Plants monitor their surrounding environment and control their physiological functions by producing an electrical response. We recorded electrical signals from different plants by exposing them to Sodium Chloride (NaCl), Ozone (O3) and Sulfuric Acid (H2SO4) under laboratory conditions. After applying pre-processing tec…
New model reveals balance crucial for robust neural coding.
We design, conduct and present the results of a highly personalized baseline emotion recognition experiment, which aims to set reliable ground-truth estimates for the subject's emotional state for real-life prediction under similar conditions using a small number of physiological sensors. We also propose an adaptive st…
Learning and memory are intertwined in our brain and their relationship is at the core of several recent neural network models. In particular, the Attention-Gated MEmory Tagging model (AuGMEnT) is a reinforcement learning network with an emphasis on biological plausibility of memory dynamics and learning. We find that …
Over the last few decades, psychologists have developed sophisticated formal models of human categorization using simple artificial stimuli. In this paper, we use modern machine learning methods to extend this work into the realm of naturalistic stimuli, enabling human categorization to be studied over the complex visu…
Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) aims to explore similarities between neural activities of different stimuli. Classical RSA techniques employ the inverse of the covariance matrix to explore a linear model between the neural activities and task events. However, calculating the inverse of a large-scale covarian…
A central challenge in neuroscience is to understand neural computations and circuit mechanisms that underlie the encoding of ethologically relevant, natural stimuli. In multilayered neural circuits, nonlinear processes such as synaptic transmission and spiking dynamics present a significant obstacle to the creation of…
Study confirms sparse coding in whole brain using MRI data.
Hyperalignment has been widely employed in Multivariate Pattern (MVP) analysis to discover the cognitive states in the human brains based on multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) datasets. Most of the existing HA methods utilized unsupervised approaches, where they only maximized the correlation be…
Study uses simulation-based inference to decode brain activity from synthetic stimuli.
Novel Bayesian model improves EEG-based BCI character selection.
fMRI semantic category understanding using linguistic encoding models attempt to learn a forward mapping that relates stimuli to the corresponding brain activation. Classical encoding models use linear multi-variate methods to predict the brain activation (all voxels) given the stimulus. However, these methods essentia…
Parallel recordings of neural spike counts have revealed the existence of context-dependent noise correlations in neural populations. Theories of population coding have also shown that such correlations can impact the information encoded by neural populations about external stimuli. Although studies have shown that the…
Human categorization is one of the most important and successful targets of cognitive modeling in psychology, yet decades of development and assessment of competing models have been contingent on small sets of simple, artificial experimental stimuli. Here we extend this modeling paradigm to the domain of natural images…
In this study, the fluctuation-dissipation theory is invoked to shed light on input-output interindustrial relations at a macroscopic level by its application to IIP (indices of industrial production) data for Japan. Statistical noise arising from finiteness of the time series data is carefully removed by making use of…
Neural encoding and decoding, which aim to characterize the relationship between stimuli and brain activities, have emerged as an important area in cognitive neuroscience. Traditional encoding models, which focus on feature extraction and mapping, consider the brain as an input-output mapper without inner states. In th…
This work uses GANs to generate realistic vehicle test inputs.
VR game data for P300 BCI with raccoon vs demon stimuli.
Multivariate Pattern (MVP) classification holds enormous potential for decoding visual stimuli in the human brain by employing task-based fMRI data sets. There is a wide range of challenges in the MVP techniques, i.e. decreasing noise and sparsity, defining effective regions of interest (ROIs), visualizing results, and…
Neuroscientists have enjoyed much success in understanding brain functions by constructing brain connectivity networks using data collected under highly controlled experimental settings. However, these experimental settings bear little resemblance to our real-life experience in day-to-day interactions with the surround…
Bayesian model improves BCI performance for ALS users.
Aggregating multi-subject functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is indispensable for generating valid and general inferences from patterns distributed across human brains. The disparities in anatomical structures and functional topographies of human brains warrant aligning fMRI data across subjects. However…
New method allows sheets to morph into multiple shapes via spatially varying stimuli.
This workshop explores the interface between cognitive neuroscience and recent advances in AI fields that aim to reproduce human performance such as natural language processing and computer vision, and specifically deep learning approaches to such problems. When studying the cognitive capabilities of the brain, scienti…
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) provides dynamical access into the complex functioning of the human brain, detailing the hemodynamic activity of thousands of voxels during hundreds of sequential time points. One approach towards illuminating the connection between fMRI and cognitive function is through dec…