Young scientist talk \ Manfred Eigen lecture theatre A key challenge in computational neuroscience is designing easy-to-fit models that also capture the wide range of responses exhibited by sensory neurons. In the retina, predictive models of retinal ganglion cell (RGC) activity that rely on linear receptive fields (RFs) require few parameters but fail to capture the cells’ sensitivity to high-frequency…
Young scientist talk \ Manfred Eigen lecture theatre Orientation preference maps (OPMs) are a canonical example of cortical organization and are commonly described within a two-dimensional framework, where orientation singularities appear as point-like pinwheels. However, (1) indicated that in three dimensions pinwheels rarely form straight columnar structures, challenging both the classical columnar hypothesis and existing two-dimensional descriptors. At present, a…
Young scientist talk \ Manfred Eigen lecture theatre White matter microstructure is a candidate neurobiological substrate underlying individual differences in cognitive abilities. However, measurement inaccuracies in MRI-derived metrics often attenuate observed effect sizes, obscuring true brain-behavior relationships. Here, we demonstrate how latent variable modeling of neuroimaging data can mitigate these reliability concerns by estimating latent effect sizes free from measurement…