Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Systems Neuroscience Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Systems Neuroscience

Tracking The Flow Of Information Through The Hippocampal Formation In The Rat, Joshua P. Neunuebel Dec 2010

Tracking The Flow Of Information Through The Hippocampal Formation In The Rat, Joshua P. Neunuebel

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

The hippocampus receives input from upper levels of the association cortex and is implicated in many mnemonic processes, but the exact mechanisms by which it codes and stores information is an unresolved topic. This work examines the flow of information through the hippocampal formation while attempting to determine the computations that each of the hippocampal subfields performs in learning and memory. The formation, storage, and recall of hippocampal-dependent memories theoretically utilize an autoassociative attractor network that functions by implementing two competitive, yet complementary, processes. Pattern separation, hypothesized to occur in the dentate gyrus (DG), refers to the ability to decrease …


Eye Movement Measures Of Cognitive Control In Children With To Urette Syndrome, Cameron B. Jeter May 2010

Eye Movement Measures Of Cognitive Control In Children With To Urette Syndrome, Cameron B. Jeter

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Tourette Syndrome begins in childhood and is characterized by uncontrollable repetitive actions like neck craning or hopping and noises such as sniffing or chirping. Worst in early adolescence, these tics wax and wane in severity and occur in bouts unpredictably, often drawing unwanted attention from bystanders. Making matters worse, over half of children with Tourette Syndrome also suffer from comorbid, or concurrent, disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). These disorders introduce anxious thoughts, impulsivity, inattention, and mood variability that further disrupt children with Tourette Syndrome from focusing and performing well at school and home. …


Efficient Encoding Of Vocalizations In The Auditory Midbrain, Lars Andreas Holmstrom Feb 2010

Efficient Encoding Of Vocalizations In The Auditory Midbrain, Lars Andreas Holmstrom

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

An important question in sensory neuroscience is what coding strategies and mechanisms are used by the brain to detect and discriminate among behaviorally relevant stimuli. To address the noisy response properties of individual neurons, sensory systems often utilize broadly tuned neurons with overlapping receptive fields at the system's periphery, resulting in homogeneous responses among neighboring populations of neurons. It has been hypothesized that progressive response heterogeneity in ascending sensory pathways is evidence of an efficient encoding strategy that minimizes the redundancy of the peripheral neural code and maximizes information throughput for higher level processing. This hypothesis has been partly supported …


Metastability And Plasticity In A Conceptual Model Of Neurons, Bo Deng Jan 2010

Metastability And Plasticity In A Conceptual Model Of Neurons, Bo Deng

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

For a new class of neuron models we demonstrate here that typical membrane action potentials and spike-bursts are only transient states but appear to be asymptotically stable; and yet such metastable states are plastic — being able to dynamically change from one action potential to another with different pulse frequencies and from one spike-burst to another with different spike-per-burst numbers. The pulse and spike-burst frequencies change with individual ions’ pump currents while their corresponding metastable-plastic states maintain the same transmembrane voltage and current profiles in range. It is also demonstrated that the plasticity requires two one-way ion pumps operating in …