Cortical oscillations support sampling-based computations in spiking neural networks.

Korcsak-Gorzo, Agnes; Müller, Michael G; Baumbach, Andreas; Leng, Luziwei; Breitwieser, Oliver J; van Albada, Sacha J; Senn, Walter; Meier, Karlheinz; Legenstein, Robert; Petrovici, Mihai A (2022). Cortical oscillations support sampling-based computations in spiking neural networks. PLoS computational biology, 18(3), e1009753. Public Library of Science 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009753

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Being permanently confronted with an uncertain world, brains have faced evolutionary pressure to represent this uncertainty in order to respond appropriately. Often, this requires visiting multiple interpretations of the available information or multiple solutions to an encountered problem. This gives rise to the so-called mixing problem: since all of these "valid" states represent powerful attractors, but between themselves can be very dissimilar, switching between such states can be difficult. We propose that cortical oscillations can be effectively used to overcome this challenge. By acting as an effective temperature, background spiking activity modulates exploration. Rhythmic changes induced by cortical oscillations can then be interpreted as a form of simulated tempering. We provide a rigorous mathematical discussion of this link and study some of its phenomenological implications in computer simulations. This identifies a new computational role of cortical oscillations and connects them to various phenomena in the brain, such as sampling-based probabilistic inference, memory replay, multisensory cue combination, and place cell flickering.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

04 Faculty of Medicine > Pre-clinic Human Medicine > Institute of Physiology

UniBE Contributor:

Senn, Walter, Petrovici, Mihai Alexandru

Subjects:

600 Technology > 610 Medicine & health
100 Philosophy > 150 Psychology

ISSN:

1553-734X

Publisher:

Public Library of Science

Language:

English

Submitter:

Pubmed Import

Date Deposited:

25 Mar 2022 10:52

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 16:16

Publisher DOI:

10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009753

PubMed ID:

35324886

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/168029

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/168029

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