Catrina Hacker

@catrinahacker.bsky.social

563 Followers 706 Following

Neuroscienctist and sci-comm enthusiast at the University of Pennsylvania interested in brains 🧠 and models of them 💻. Website: catrinahacker.com

A bridge connecting the left side labeled "Animal models, spikes, neural coding mechanisms" with pictures of a mouse, rat, and monkey, to the right side labeled "humans, field potentials, clinical application" with pictures of human patients and someone with a deep brain stimulator. A circle of arrows pointing both directions labeled "basic translational neuroscience" is over the bridge.
Table showing several previous studies that have and have not found alignment between spikes and LFPs. The table shows that variables encoded as magnitude codes and clustered pattern-of-spikes codes have consistently been shown to be aligned between spikes and LFPs, whereas those encoded as salt and pepper pattern-of-spikes codes have not.
Schematic showing neural representations as vectors in high-dimensional space. Variables that change the vector magnitude are magnitude codes, whereas those that change the relative angles between vectors are pattern-of-spikes codes. The visual compares these two types of representations in spikes to field potentials in two cases. One where pattern-of-spikes codes are encoded by neurons where those with similar tuning are anatomically clustered (clustered) and another where they are not (salt and pepper). Magnitude codes and clustered pattern-of-spikes codes are aligned between spikes and HGA, whereas salt and pepper pattern-of-spikes codes are not.
Representational similarity matrix for five categories in spiking activity (left) and high gamma activity (right). The categorical representations (blocks along the diagonal) are clear and strong in spikes but not in high gamma activity.
A plot of the performance of a decoder trained to distinguish novel from repeated images as a function of how many channels of high-gamma activity or neurons' spiking activity are included in the analysis. Performance grows noticeably faster for high-gamma activity than for spikes.
Plots comparing neural representations of novelty, recency, and memorability between spikes (top row) and high-gamma activity (bottom row). The results look very similar.
Visualization of spiking activity measured as grand mean firing rate as a function of time relative to stimulus onset next to a similar visualization for high-gamma activity. The two plots look very similar.
Image of a brain made of music notes next to the words "Keeping Your Brain's Symphony in Sync".