Computational neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand the principles that govern the development, structure, physiology and cognitive abilities of the nervous system.
The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background, and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience. The binding problem refers to the overall encoding of our brain circuits for the combination of decisions, actions, and perception. It is considered a "problem" due to the fact that no complete model exists.
Neural oscillations, or brainwaves, are rhythmic or repetitive patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system. Neural tissue can generate oscillatory activity in many ways, driven either by mechanisms within individual neurons or by interactions between neurons. In individual neurons, oscillations can appear either as oscillations in membrane potential or as rhythmic patterns of action potentials, which then produce oscillatory activation of post-synaptic neurons. At the level of neural ensembles, synchronized activity of large numbers of neurons can give rise to macroscopic oscillations, which can be observed in an electroencephalogram. Oscillatory activity in groups of neurons generally arises from feedback connections between the neurons that result in the synchronization of their firing patterns. The interaction between neurons can give rise to oscillations at a different frequency than the firing frequency of individual neurons. A well-known example of macroscopic neural oscillations is alpha activity.
A neuronal ensemble is a population of nervous system cells involved in a particular neural computation.
David J. Heeger is an American neuroscientist, psychologist, computer scientist, data scientist, and entrepreneur. He is a professor at New York University, Chief Scientific Officer of Statespace Labs, and Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Epistemic AI.
Neural coding is a neuroscience field concerned with characterising the hypothetical relationship between the stimulus and the neuronal responses, and the relationship among the electrical activities of the neurons in the ensemble. Based on the theory that sensory and other information is represented in the brain by networks of neurons, it is believed that neurons can encode both digital and analog information.
Stanislas Dehaene is a French author and cognitive neuroscientist whose research centers on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. As of 2017, he is a professor at the Collège de France and, since 1989, the director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging".
Mriganka Sur is an Indian neuroscientist. He is the Newton Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Visiting Faculty Member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and N.R. Narayana Murthy Distinguished Chair in Computational Brain Research at the Centre for Computational Brain Research, IIT Madras. He was on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2010 and has been serving as Jury Chair from 2018.
Repetition priming refers to improvements in a behavioural response when stimuli are repeatedly presented. The improvements can be measured in terms of accuracy or reaction time and can occur when the repeated stimuli are either identical or similar to previous stimuli. These improvements have been shown to be cumulative, so as the number of repetitions increases the responses get continually faster up to a maximum of around seven repetitions. These improvements are also found when the repeated items are changed slightly in terms of orientation, size and position. The size of the effect is also modulated by the length of time the item is presented for and the length time between the first and subsequent presentations of the repeated items.
In cognitive neuroscience, visual modularity is an organizational concept concerning how vision works. The way in which the primate visual system operates is currently under intense scientific scrutiny. One dominant thesis is that different properties of the visual world require different computational solutions which are implemented in anatomically/functionally distinct regions that operate independently – that is, in a modular fashion.
The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for the occurrence of the mental states to which they are related. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena; that is, neural changes which necessarily and regularly correlate with a specific experience. The set should be minimal because, under the materialist assumption that the brain is sufficient to give rise to any given conscious experience, the question is which of its components are necessary to produce it.
Ralph Mitchell Siegel, a researcher who studied the neurological underpinnings of vision, was a professor of neuroscience at Rutgers University, Newark, in the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience. He died September 2, 2011, at his home following a long illness.
Joseph Anthony Movshon ForMemRS is an American neuroscientist. He has made contributions to the understanding of the brain mechanisms that represent the form and motion of objects, and the way these mechanisms contribute to perceptual judgments and visually guided movement. He is a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science.
Marisa Carrasco is a Mexican psychologist, who is a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. She uses human psychophysics, neuroimaging, and computational modeling to investigate the relation between the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in visual perception and attention.
David Poeppel is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU). From 2014 until the end of 2021, he was the Director of the Department of Neuroscience at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA). In 2019, he co-founded the Center for Language, Music and Emotion (CLaME) an international joint research center, co-sponsored by the Max Planck Society and New York University. Since 2021, he is the managing director of the Ernst Strüngmann Institute.
The Karl Spencer Lashley Award is awarded by The American Philosophical Society as a recognition of research on the integrative neuroscience of behavior. The award was established in 1957 by a gift from Dr. Karl Spencer Lashley.
Andreas Karl Engel is a German neuroscientist. He is the director of the Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE).
The term posterior cortical hot zone was coined by Christof Koch and colleagues to describe the part of the neocortex closely associated with the minimal neural substrate essential for conscious perception. The posterior cortical hot zone includes sensory cortical areas in the parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes. It is the “sensory” cortex, much as the frontal cortex is the “action” cortex.
Peter H. Schiller was a German-born neuroscientist. At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Schiller is well known for his work on the behavioral, neurophysiological and pharmacological studies of the primate visual and oculomotor systems.
Ehud Zohary is an Israeli scientist, professor of neurobiology at the Edmond and Lilly Safra Center for Brain Science and Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
