Published in Biological Cybernetics
All organisms must be able to adapt to changes in the environment. To this end, they have developed sophisticated regulatory mechanisms to ensure homeostasis. Control engineers, who must design similar regulatory systems, have developed a number of general principles that govern feedback regulation. These lead to constraints which impose trade-offs...
Published in Biological Cybernetics
Spectral analysis and neural field theory are used to investigate the role of local connections in brain connectivity matrices (CMs) that quantify connectivity between pairs of discretized brain regions. This work investigates how the common procedure of omitting such self-connections (i.e., the diagonal elements of CMs) in published studies of bra...
Published in Biological cybernetics
Decoding the direction of translating objects in front of cluttered moving backgrounds, accurately and efficiently, is still a challenging problem. In nature, lightweight and low-powered flying insects apply motion vision to detect a moving target in highly variable environments during flight, which are excellent paradigms to learn motion perceptio...
Published in Biological Cybernetics
The rapid eye movements (saccades) used to transfer gaze between targets are examples of an action. The behaviour of saccades matches that of the slow–fast model of actions originally proposed by Zeeman. Here, we extend Zeeman’s model by incorporating an accumulator that represents the increase in certainty of the presence of a target, together wit...
Published in Biological Cybernetics
The semicircular ducts (SCDs) of the vestibular system play an instrumental role in equilibration and rotation perception of vertebrates. The present paper is a review of quantitative approaches and shows how SCDs function. It consists of three parts. First, the biophysical mechanisms of an SCD system composed of three mutually connected ducts, all...
Published in Biological cybernetics
Published in Biological Cybernetics
Information about time-dependent sensory stimuli is encoded in the activity of neural populations; distinct aspects of the stimulus are read out by different types of neurons: while overall information is perceived by integrator cells, so-called coincidence detector cells are driven mainly by the synchronous activity in the population that encodes ...
Published in Biological cybernetics
This hybrid of review and personal essay argues that models of visual construction are essential to extend spatial navigation models to models that link episodic memory and imagination. The starting point is the TAM-WG model, combining the Taxon Affordance Model and the World Graph model of spatial navigation. The key here is to reject approaches i...
Published in Biological Cybernetics
Tasks that require the cooperation of both hands and arms are common in human everyday life. Coordination helps to synchronize in space and temporally motion of the upper limbs. In fine bimanual tasks, coordination enables also to achieve higher degrees of precision that could be obtained from a single hand. We studied the acquisition of bimanual f...
Published in Biological Cybernetics
Neurobiological theories of spatial cognition developed with respect to recording data from relatively small and/or simplistic environments compared to animals’ natural habitats. It has been unclear how to extend theoretical models to large or complex spaces. Complementarily, in autonomous systems technology, applications have been growing for dist...
