Recent studies of biological auditory processing have revealed that sophisticated spectrotemporal analyses are performed by central auditory systems of various animals. The analysis is typically well matched with the statistics of relevant natural sounds, suggesting that it produces an optimal representation of the animal’s acoustic biotope. We address this topic using simulated neurons that le...

Several theoretical, computational, and experimental studies suggest that neurons encode sensory information using a small number of active neurons at any given point in time. This strategy, referred to as 'sparse coding', could possibly confer several advantages. First, it allows for increased storage capacity in associative memories; second, it makes the structure in natural signals explicit;...