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Bridging the Gap Between Levels of Organization: The Importance of Computational Neuroscience| old_uid | 15047 |
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| title | Bridging the Gap Between Levels of Organization: The Importance of Computational Neuroscience |
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| start_date | 2015/02/05 |
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| schedule | 10h30-12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | EuroMov |
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| summary | One of the biggest challenges in neuroscience, if not the biggest, is bridging the gap between levels of organization. Many of these difficulties arise from the fact that the results at the higher level such as movement or cognition arise from multiple elements at the lower level that are spatially distributed. In addition, the solutions at this lower level, which could be muscular or neuronal are also variable and redundant. During this talk I will propose how computational neuroscience can help to confront rather than avoid this complexity by means of i) computational models and ii) computational tools. Computational models in general, attempt to mimic salient physiological characteristics and can be used to test hypotheses, probe mechanisms and, most importantly, to make predictions. I will describe a model we developed in order to understand how timing information can be represented in a distributed neuronal network. In contrast, computational tools do not attempt to mimic neural processes but, rather, deal with the problem of recordings taken from a distributed system. I will illustrate this application by showing how machine learning methods can be used to identify the muscles that are most critically involved in creating the variations in several types of whole body pointing, or in the anticipatory postural activities that precede these movements. At a more neuronal and cognitive level, I will describe how a population of approximately 50 neurons in the inferior temporal cortex can encode information concerning tree and non-tree categories. |
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| responsibles | Hoffmann, Marin |
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