ANC Workshop - Isabel Cornacchia

Tuesday, 15th November 2022

An information-maximisation approach to understanding cortical circuit organisation and function

Abstract: Cortical circuits exhibit rich and complex patterns of synaptic connectivity, which depend on both the cell type and stimulus selectivity of the pre- and post-synaptic neurons. While extensive experimental effort has been invested to measure and characterise this connectivity, we currently lack a principled theoretical explanation for the synaptic organisation of cortical circuits. A substantial body of work has shown that receptive fields and nonlinearities in early sensory systems can be understood as acting to efficiently encode sensory input, which raises the question of whether cortical connectivity could be understood in a similar manner. To test this, we developed a method to optimise the recurrent connectivity of a cortical circuit to efficiently encode an ensemble of input stimuli and asked whether the networks that emerge account for the synaptic and functional organisation of cortical circuits observed in experiment.

Event type: Workshop

Date: Tuesday, 15th November 2022

Time: 11:00

Location: G.03

Speaker(s): Isabel Cornacchia

Chair/Host: Michael Camilleri