Zach Cohen
Theoretical/computational neuroscience, PhD student @harvard.edu, @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social graduate fellow, formerly princeton cs
- Finally up on bioRxiv! A new study with @jdrugowitsch.bsky.social where we do a deep dive into the coding benefits of receptive field heterogeneity and come up with new ways to measure receptive fields! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... [1/n]
- Populations across the brain have differently sized and shaped receptive fields. A striking example of this is hippocampal CA1 place cells, whose receptive fields can be mere centimeters across or as large as a few meters in size (fig from Rich et al., 2014) . [2/n]
- Why would the brain prefer such variability? Is there a general coding benefit associated with heterogeneously sized receptive fields? This question has been asked in specific populations and under specific conditions, but a theory that unifies these accounts is lacking… [3/n]
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View full threadtl;dr: populations encoding 2- and 3-D quantities need shape and size heterogeneity to increase encoded information. We show how one can measure these heterogeneities using Bayesian inference, which offers a principled way of handling noisy, incomplete neural data. [n=16/n]
