The variability of neuronal responses is proportional to the mean in many brain areas, which suggests that neural responses might follow a Poisson distribution. In this issue of Neuron, Maimon and Assad document a surprising violation of Poisson firing. Specifically, they show that there are differences in the amount of periodic structure in spike trains across cortical areas, with multimodal s...

Experimental and clinical applications of extracellular recordings of spiking cell activity frequently are used to relate the activity of a cell to externally measurable signals such as surface potentials, sensory stimuli, or movement measurements. When the external signal is time-varying, correlation methods have traditionally been used to quantify the degree of relation with the neural firing...

The influence of intrinsic firing interspike interval correlations on the noise spectrum and information transfer is studied. This is done through the comparison of two simple firing models, one of which is a renewal process while the other displays interval correlations. These correlations are shown to shape the spike train power spectrum and, in particular, to decrease the noise power at low ...

Although vector strength (VS) and the Rayleigh tests are widely used to quantify neuronal firing synchrony to cyclic events, their use is valid only for singly peaked, unimodal distributions. In this report, we propose a new method to quantify synchrony, applicable to both unimodal and multimodal distributions. We also propose a statistical test to examine temporal structure under a null hypoth...

The population activity of random networks of excitatory and inhibitory leaky integrate-and-fire neurons has been studied extensively. In particular, a state of asynchronous activity with low firing rates and low pairwise correlations emerges in sparsely connected networks. We apply linear response theory to evaluate the influence of detailed network structure on neuron dynamics. It turns out t...

We show how a topological model which describes the stretching and squeezing mechanisms responsible for creating chaotic behavior can be extracted from the neural spike train data. The mechanism we have identified is the same one ("gateau roule," or jelly-roll) which has previously been identified in the Duffing oscillator [Gilmore and McCallum, Phys. Rev. E 51, 935 (1995)] and in a YAG laser [...

Traditionally, students can undergo performance training by imitating teachers’ motions and improving their moves by following teachers’ advice. However, teachers are not always available and there is a lack of effective self-training tools. In this paper, we propose an immersive performance training system with motion capture technology. Our aim is to provide a virtual training environment for...

A container for cargo use travels various countries with a lot of kinds of goods. It arrives at a place with some goods, and then it leaves to a different place with different goods. A container itself is a kind of transportation in the viewpoint from goods. We imagined if the goods were we, a container would be a train. We have proposed a new experience-based artwork using a container to resem...

In this work we introduce and evaluate a model of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Parameters. In the first stage we train agents to execute relatively simple actions like reaching or gripping. In the second stage we train a hierarchical manager to compose these actions to solve more complicated tasks. The manager may pass parameters to agents thus controlling details of undertaken acti...

In the 2014 finalised timetable for Sweden 314 operation days had a unique set of trains i.e. a unique traffic pattern. Despite this, the finalised timetable generally provides only one conflict resolved train path for each train, and this train path is to be used for all of the train’s operation days. Further, once the yearly timetable has been finalised train paths may not be changed, causing...