“Searching for low-dimensional neural manifolds”
Giovedì 25 Gennaio 2024, ore 17:00 - Aula 1C150 - Michele Allegra (Padova Neuroscience Center, Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Galileo Galilei”)
Abstract
Traditionally, the relation between cognition and the brain was understood in terms of neurons performing a sequence of operations on input signals. In recent years, the advent of large-scale neuronal recordings has shifted the focus on movement within representational spaces collectively implemented by neural populations. Geometrically, we can picture these spaces, termed “neural manifolds”, as low-dimensional surfaces in a neural population state space in which each axis represents the activity of one neuron. Modelling movement along the manifold provides a dynamical-system description of neural computation. In this talk, I will provide an introduction to the topic, focusing on how neural manifolds can be characterized and reconstructed from the data by combining geometrical and probabilistic methods.
