Spiking Neural networks as Universal Function Approximators

Neuronal assemblies — groups of strongly connected neurons — are considered the basic building blocks of perception and memory in the brain by encoding representations of specific concepts. Despite re...

By photostimulating specific visual cortical ensembles, Bounds et al. discovered that an ensemble’s impact on local neural activity, not its visual encoding properties, predicts its impact on stimulus detection. Their analysis reveals that mice use a generalizable, albeit suboptimal, perceptual readout strategy of summing all V1 activity to detect stimuli.