Outline of the Course

In this course, the students will go through several, mostly recent articles within the broader area of computational neuroscience. Each week will be dedicated to one research article (see choice of articles below). This article will be presented by a student in a short talk (about 30 minutes), followed by a discussion among the students. To ensure a lively discussion, every student has to read the article and submit a question about it one week in advance. The topics cover computational models from the single neuron level to behavior. Most of the articles adress modern problems in the brain sciences and use a combination of experiments and mathematical analysis to solve them. Students will be free to choose an article to their liking, and will be assigned one of the faculty member as advisor. Every session is closed with a 5-10 min review talk by the responsible professor.

Intended Audience

Validation

Students in the course will be judged by the talk they give (50%) and their participation in the discussions of all the other talks (50%). The course will be worth 4 ECTS credits.

Course Language

The course languages will be French and English. Talks can be held in either language.

Space-Time Coordinates

Wednesdays 17.00-19.00
45, rue des Saints-Pères, Salle Wilkins, 2nd floor
First meeting and introduction: October 5
Next meetings: October 12, October 19, ...

Contact

Romain Brette (01 44 32 26 72, romain.brette@ens.fr)
Sophie Denève (01 44 32 26 35, sophie.deneve@ens.fr)
Boris Gutkin (01 44 32 27 93, boris.gutkin@ens.fr)
Vincent Hakim (01 44 32 37 68, hakim@lps.ens.fr)
Reinoud Maex (01 44 32 27 98, r.maex1@herts.ac.uk)
Adrien Wohrer (01 44 32 27 98, adrien.wohrer@ens.fr)

Schedule

Date Speaker Topic Presentation Responsible Faculty
October 5 Introduction General Instructions Sophie Denève
October 12 Sophie Denève 13 Example presentation Sophie Denève
October 19 Yann Zerlaut 21 Vincent Hakim
October 26 Guillaume Dehaene 5 Adrien Wohrer
November 9 Mickael Elbaz 4 Vincent Hakim
November 16 Marie Devaine 19 Sophie Denève
November 23 Paul Masset 14 Adrien Wohrer
November 30 Veronika Koren 10 Boris Gutkin
December 7 Flora Bouchacourt 18 Boris Gutkin
December 14 Thomas Andrillon 9 Reinoud Maex
January 4 Glen Lomax 2 Adrien Wohrer

Articles/ Talks

Before You Start

How To give a talk. pdf
General instructions for the presentation. pdf

Topic 1: How Much Light Can We See? The Limits of Perception

Barlow HB, Levick WR, Yoon M (1971) Responses to single quanta of light in retinal ganglion cells of the cat. Vision Res 3:87-101. pdf
Responsible faculty: Romain Brette

Topic 2: How Clever Is the Retina? Predicting the Immediate Future

Berry MJ, Brivanlou IH, Jordan TA, Meister M (1999) Anticipation of moving stimuli by the retina. Nature 398:334-338. pdf
Responsible faculty: Adrien Wohrer

Topic 3: What Determine's a Neuron's Tuning? The Efficient Coding of Sensory Information

Smith EC, Lewicki MS (2006) Efficient auditory coding. Nature 398:334-338. pdf
Responsible faculty: Romain Brette

Topic 4: Are Neurons Little Calculators? Even Insects Can Multiply

Gabbiani F, Krapp HG, Koch C, Laurent G (2002) Multiplicative computation in a visual neuron sensitive to looming. Nature 420(6913):320-324. pdf
Responsible faculty: Vincent Hakim

Topic 5: What Does a Fly See? Reading a Neural Code

Bialek W, Rieke F, de Ruyter van Steveninck RR, Warland D (1991) Reading a neural code. Science 252(5014):1854-1857. pdf
Responsible faculty: Adrien Wohrer

Topic 6: What Does a Human Being See? Reading the Human Mind

Kay KN, Naselaris T, Prenger RJ, Gallant JL (2008) Identifying natural images from human brain activity. Nature 452(7185):352-355. pdf
Responsible faculty: Sophie Denève

Topic 7: What Do Neurons Know? Reading Population Codes

Seung HS, Sompolinsky H (1993) Simple models for reading neuronal population codes. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 90: 10749-10753. pdf
Responsible faculty: Sophie Denève

Topic 8: What Do Neurons Know? Reading Population Codes.

Cohen MR, Newsome WT (2009) Estimates of the contribution of single neurons to perception depend on timescale and noise correlation. J Neurosci 29(20):6635-6648. pdf
Responsible faculty: Adrien Wohrer

Topic 9: What Causes Perception? Microstimulation of the Brain

Salzman CD, Britten KH, Newsome WT (1990) Cortical microstimulation influences perceptual judgements of motion direction. Nature 346(6280):174-177. pdf debate + erratum
Responsible faculty: Reinoud Maex

Topic 10: How Do Neurons Communicate? The Conundrum of the Neural Code.

Mehta MR, Lee AK, Wilson MA (2002) Role of experience and oscillations in transforming a rate code into a temporal code. Nature 487:741-746 pdf
Responsible faculty: Boris Gutkin

Topic 11: How Do We Navigate? The Curious Case of Grid Cells.

Burgess N, Barry C, O'Keefe J (2007) An oscillatory interference model of grid cell firing. Hippocampus 17:801-812 pdf
Responsible faculty: Vincent Hakim

Topic 12: How Do We Deal With Ambiguity? A biophysical model of binocular rivalry.

Lang CR, Chow CC (2002) A spiking neuron model for binocular rivalry. J Comp Neurosci 12: 39-53. pdf
Responsible faculty: Vincent Hakim

Topic 13: How Do We Deal With Uncertainty? Bayesian Computations in the Brain.

Kording KP, Wolpert DM (2004) Bayesian integration in sensorimotor learning. Nature 427(6971):244-247. pdf
Responsible faculty: Sophie Denève

Topic 14: How Do Rats Deal With Uncertainty? An Insight Look.

Kepecs A, Uchida N, Zariwala HA, Mainen ZF (2008). Neural correlates, computation and behavioural impact of decision confidence. Nature 455:277-231. pdf
Responsible faculty: Adrien Wohrer

Topic 15: How Much Noise Does the Brain Generate? Sometimes Almost None.

Osborne LC, Lisberger SG, Bialek W (2005) A sensory source for motor variation. Nature 437:412-416 pdf
Responsible faculty: Boris Gutkin

Topic 16: How Static Are Our Memories? When memories change over time.

Preminger S, Blumenfeld B, Sagi D, Tsodyks M (2009) Mapping dynamic memories of gradually changing objects. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106: 5371-5376. pdf
Responsible faculty: Vincent Hakim

Topic 17: What Makes Us Happy? The Dopamine System: Getting What You Want and Expect.

Schultz W, Dayan P, Montague PR (1997) A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science 275(5306):1593-1599. pdf
Responsible faculty: Boris Gutkin

Topic 18: Can You Drink Yourself to Death? Addiction as a Computational Process Gone Awry.

Redish AD (2004) Addiction as a computational process gone awry. Science 306(5703):1944-1947. pdf + debate (see pubmed)
Responsible faculty: Boris Gutkin

Topic 19: How Should You Act in Unknown Environments? The Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma Revisited.

Daw ND, O'Doherty JP, Dayan P, Seymour B, Dolan RJ (2006) Cortical substrates for exploratory decisions in humans. Nature 441:876-879. pdf
Responsible faculty: Sophie Denève

Topic 20: How Do Animals Exploit Rewards? The Biophysics of the Matching Law.

Loewenstein Y, Seung HS (2006) Operant matching is a generic outcome of synaptic plasticity based on the covariance between reward and neural activity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 103: 15224-15229. pdf
Responsible faculty: Boris Gutkin

Topic 21: How Energy-Efficient Is the Brain? Optimizing Computations with a 20 Watt-Limit.

Attwell D, Laughlin SB (2001) An energy budget for signaling in the grey matter of the brain. J Cerebral Blood Flow Metabolism:475-80. pdf
Responsible faculty: Vincent Hakim

Topic 22: How Many Neurons Fit Into a Brain? Optimization Under Wiring Constraints

Chklovskii DB, Schikorski T, Stevens CF (2002) Wiring optimization in cortical circuits. Neuron 34(3):341-347. pdf
Responsible faculty: Vincent Hakim

Topic 23: Can a Brain Be Reconstructed in the Near Future? The Science of Connectomics

Briggman KL, Denk W (2006) Towards neural circuit reconstruction with volume electron microscopy techniques. Curr Opin Neurobiol 16:562-570. pdf
Responsible faculty: Reinoud Maex