Welcome to the Virtual Poster area! Presentations can be classic static posters, short slideshows or even short video-talks.
Posters are on view all time. All presentations will remain available on this page even after the end of the conference. From Monday November 8th to Friday November 18th included you will be able to post your questions in the comment forum below each presentation. The presenters will leave their answer, answering in threads and you can choose to receive a notification when an answer is posted to your question.
Presenters are free to propose in the forum and in the conference chat self-organized video-presentations with interested attendants, sharing zoom links to private external meetings. Moments suitable for organizing these presentations are the coffee and lunch break slots, and, particularly, the long break between 15h30 and 16h30 on Tuesday November 8.
Contributed presentations
Poster 2022#1 – Helen S. ANSELL – Structural Criticality of 3D Brain Volumes
The highly complex structure of the brain is integral to its function, yet many aspects of the physical structure of the brain and how they aid its function remain poorly understood. Here we utilize millimeter-scale 3D reconstructions of brain volumes [1-3] to examine physical properties of the structure of the brain at the cellular level.…
Poster 2022#2 – Yuri DABAGHIAN – Grid Cell Percolation
Grid cells are famous for the lattice-like layouts of their firing fields—a property has led many researchers to assume that these neurons readily convey spatial scales and metrics to downstream networks and thus contribute to spatial cognition and memory. In reality, this is not the case: grid cells commonly exhibit irregular spiking, reflecting how the…
Poster 2022#3 – Takahisa DATE – Effects of spatial constraints of inhibitory connectivity on the dynamical development of criticality in spiking networks
Many experimental studies have reported that in-vitro neuronal networks develop into a critical state. Potential mechanisms for such development have been suggested by modeling studies, such as short-term and long-term synaptic plasticity, the balance between excitatory and inhibitory neurons, or the network topology. However, it remains unclear how these mechanisms are orchestrated in physical space…
Poster 2022#4 – Anja RABUS – Different paths of information routing preserve scale-free neuronal and behavioral dynamics [VIDEO]
Different paths of information routing preserve scale-free neuronal and behavioural dynamics. Psychedelics promote altered mental states and under certain conditions, mental health. Recent investigation into the mechanism of psychedelics has focused on whole-brain models. We study the relationship between functional connectivity (FC) and neuronal and behavioral dynamics on the microscale in the retro-splenial cortex (RSC)…
Poster 2022#5 – Anna-Thekla JÄGER – Self-Similar Properties of the rs-fMRI Signal Reflect Functional Changes in Neuroplasticity Following Motor Sequence Learning
Recent research in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that scale-free properties of brain signals can meaningfully reflect human brain activity in health and disease. Here, we sought to examine whether changes in scale-free temporal dynamics within resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) data are reflective of functional neuroplasticity following sequence-specific motor sequence learning (MSL). Using the Hurst…
Poster 2022#6 – Eunjin HWANG – Characterization of Phase Transition in Brain during Anesthesia-Induced Loss of Consciousness
The thalamocortical system plays a key role in the breakdown or emergence of consciousness, providing bottom-up information delivery from sensory afferents and integrating top-down intracortical and thalamocortical reciprocal signaling. A fundamental and so far unanswered question for cognitive neuroscience remains whether the thalamocortical switch for consciousness works in a discontinuous manner or not. To unveil…
Poster 2022#7 – Benedetta MARIANI – Collective oscillations in the rat barrel-thalamus network
Task-dependent neuronal oscillations are often found in mammalian cortical networks, and investigating their origin and function is an open area of research[1]. In this work we analyze LFPs and MUAs data from the barrel cortex of urethane anesthetized rats, and we find long-lasting collective oscillations in the 6-10 Hz band after stimulation of the rat…
Poster 2022#8 – Geza ODOR – Comparison of the synchronization transition of the Kuramoto model on fruit-fly versus a large human connectome
Previous simulation studies on human connectomes suggested that critical dynamics emerge subcritically in the so-called Griffiths phases. Now we investigate this on the largest available brain network, the 21662 node fruit-fly connectome, using the Kuramoto synchronization model. As this graph is less heterogeneous, lacking modular structure and exhibiting high topological dimension, we expect a difference…
Poster 2022#9 – Wesley Charles SMITH – In vivo Quantification of Neural Criticality and Complexity in Mouse Cortex and Striatum in a Model of Cocaine Abstinence
Self-organized criticality is a hallmark of complex dynamic systems at phase transitions. Systems that operate at or near criticality have large-scale fluctuations or “avalanches”, the frequency and duration power of which are best fit with a power law revealing them to be scale-free and fractal, and such power laws are ubiquitous. It is an attractive…
Poster 2022#10 – Gabriel MARGHOTI – Intermittent chimera-like and bi-stable synchronization states in network of distinct Izhikevich neurons [VIDEO]
Phase synchronization phenomena of neuronal networks are one of many features depicted by real networks that can be studied using computational models. Here, we proceed with numerical simulations of a globally connected network composed of non-identical (distinct) Izhikevich neuron model to study clustered phase synchronization. We investigate the case in which, once coupled, there exist…
Poster 2022#11 – Jungyoung KIM – Synaptic I/E ratio affects neural network synchronization and computational capabilities
We introduce a neural network model to study the effect of synchronization on the encoding capacity and spreading spikes in more realistic situation. In this model the neural network is composed of excitatory and inhibitory neurons and long-lasting synaptic current operated by heterogeneous Poisson synaptic input. Based on numerical integration, we find three different regimes…
Poster 2022#12 – Flavio R. RUSCH – Self-organized quasi-criticality in hierarchical modular networks of Galves-Löcherbach neurons
The critical brain hypothesis states that the cortex operates near a continuous phase transition between absorbing and active states. At the critical point, the network spiking activity would be characterized by neuronal avalanches with size and duration probability distributions given by power laws with well-defined critical exponents. However, experimental measurements show multiple pairs of exponents…
Poster 2022#13 – Tobias KÜHN – Inference methods for spike-count neurons: how not to lose spikes
Maximum-entropy models have been successfully applied to neuronal data stemming from diverse areas like cortex, hippocampus or the retina. Despite this success, it features the major drawback of being restricted to describing every neuron to be in one out of two states: in a given time bin, either there was at least one spike or…
Poster 2022#14 – Sabrina CAMARGO – Scale-free correlations in the dynamics of a small (N ~ 10000) cortical network
The advent of novel opto-genetics technology allows the recording of brain activity with a resolution never seen before. The characterization of these very large data sets offers new challenges as well as unique theory-testing opportunities. Here we discuss whether the spatial and temporal correlation of the collective activity of thousands of neurons is tangled as…
Poster 2022#15 – Emanuel CAMBRAIA – The influence of the local dynamics in the phase synchronization of a network of Hindmarsh-Rose neurons
Partial phase synchronization, also reported as neuron cooperation, is a pivotal behavior of the brain and related to its main features, such as memory. We report here how individual characteristics of the local dynamics of neurons coupled in a network may be a fundamental player in the phase synchronization process. Global and small-world topologies are…
Poster 2022#16 – Enrique C. GABRICK – Dynamic range on the criticality as a function of the excitatory and inhibitory synaptic intensities [VIDEO]
In this work, we study the dynamic range (DR) of a neuronal network of excitable neurons with excitatory and inhibitory synapses. We obtain an analytical expression for the critical point as a function of the excitatory and inhibitory synaptic intensities. We also determine an analytical expression that gives the critical point value in which the…
Poster 2022#17 – Riccardo CUSINATO – Intrinsic neural timescales in the temporal lobe support an auditory processing hierarchy
During rest, intrinsic neural dynamics manifest at multiple timescales, which progressively increase along visual and somatosensory hierarchies. Theoretically, intrinsic timescales are thought to facilitate processing of external stimuli at multiple stages. However, direct links between timescales at rest and sensory processing, as well as translation to the auditory system are lacking. Here, we used intracranial…
Poster 2022#18 – Fabrizio LOMBARDI – Adaptive neural networks explain coexistence of avalanches and oscillations in resting human brain
Neurons in the brain are wired into adaptive networks that exhibit a range of collective dynamics. Oscillations, for example, are paradigmatic synchronous patterns of neural activity with a defined temporal scale. Neuronal avalanches, in contrast, are scale-free cascades of neural activity, often considered as evidence of brain tuning to criticality. While models have been developed…
Poster 2022#19 – Vinicius LIMA – Weak but coordinated inter- regional coherence is modulated by working memory content [ANIMATED SLIDES]
Working memory requires large-scale coordination among widespread cortical and subcortical brain regions. Long-range coherence between the oscillatory activity of distant regions, arising in multiple frequency bands, may be a mechanism supporting information routing and integration across large-scale distributed multi-regional networks. In line with this hypothesis, the strength of long-range coherence links between frontal and parietal…
Poster 2022#20 – Mauricio GIRARDI-SCHIAPPO – Brain criticality beyond avalanches: open problems and how to approach them
A homeostatic mechanism that keeps the brain highly susceptible to stimuli and optimizes many of its functions — although this is a compelling theoretical argument in favor of the brain criticality hypothesis, the experimental evidence accumulated during the last two decades is still not entirely convincing, causing the idea to be seemingly unknown in the…
Poster 2022#21 – Hanieh ALVANKAR GOLPALYEGAN – Bistability and criticality in the stochastic Wilson-Cowan model
We study the stochastic version of the Wilson-Cowan model of neural dynamics, where the response function of neurons grows faster than linearly above the threshold, representing a cooperative effect of different synaptic inputs. The model shows a region of parameters where two attractive fixed points of the dynamics exist simultaneously, corresponding to lower and higher…
Poster 2022#22 – Merlin DUMEUR – Multifractal scaling in the Landau-Ginzburg theory for cortical dynamics
Scale-invariance and diverging length scales are the hallmark of critical systems, the study of which can provide insights into its relation to critical universality classes. In neuroscience, the brain criticality hypothesis has motivated the characterization of cerebral activity using avalanche scaling exponents and long-range temporal correlations. In non-invasive brain recording modalities, the degree of spatial…
Poster 2022#23 – Jyotika BAHUGUNA – Effective connectivity between spatiotemporal multi-frequency elements predict visuomotor behavior
Numerous studies have described frequency specific event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) calculated by averaging across single-trial absolute power time-series. However, there are two main limitations of this approach. First, searching for univocal correspondences between specific sensory, motor or cognitive processes and specific space-frequency-time oscillatory activities gives only a fragmentary description. Second, these oscillatory features may not even…
Poster 2022#24 – Jacob BARFIELD – Working memory and flexibility are balanced near criticality
Holding some information in mind – i.e. working memory – is thought to require neural activity that persists during the period the information is held in mind. This idea is based on experiments in which animals are presented with a brief sensory stimulus that they must hold in working memory during a delay period (with…
Poster 2022#25 – Joon-Young MOON – Fluctuating Inter-Regional Delays in the Human Cerebral Cortex
The flow of information between cortical regions depends on the excitability at each site, which is reflected in fluctuating field potentials. It remains uncertain how global changes in field potentials affect the latency and strength of cortico-cortical couplings. Therefore, we measured changes in oscillations and inter-regional couplings by recording intracranially from the human cerebral cortex.…
Poster 2022#26 – Sophie BENITEZ STULZ – When local alterations meet collective oscillatory dynamics: On the causes of functional connectivity changes [VIDEO]
Neuronal populations within local regions frequently undergo oscillatory modulations of their activity. The oscillations of distant populations coupled by long-range connections can lock in various patterns of stable phase differences and the flexible change of such phase locking patterns has been hypothesized to modulate communication and functional connectivity (FC) between them. It is therefore important…
Poster 2022#27 – Samy CASTRO – More than the sum of the parts: multi-frequency oscillations emerge from synergistic integration in canonic cortical columns [VIDEO]
Oscillatory coherence mediates flexible multi-frequency cortico-cortical interactions. Bottom-up and top-down influences along the cortical hierarchy rely, respectively, on faster or slower frequency bands. Besides the observation that directed inter-regional functional connectivity (dFC) does exploit multiple frequencies, it is not clear why this should be the case. Simple explanations for the frequency-specificity of dFC rest in…
Poster 2022#28 – Michele COLOMBO – An empirical link between the EEG spectral exponent, the complexity of TMS-evoked EEG dynamics and consciousness, across severe brain-injury and anesthesia
Severe brain injuries can result in Disorders of Consciousness (DoC), whereby consciousness may be retained, despite widely different limitations of the behavioural repertoire. Objective, mechanistically interpretable neurophysiological markers of consciousness are thus needed to help overcome the limitations of behavioural assessments of DoC following severe brain injuries. Severe brain injuries, by removing thalamocortical afferent connectivity,…
Poster 2022#29 – Sheida KAZEMI – Second-order phase transition and synchronization analysis in networks of neural mass phase oscillators
Background: Synchronization is a phenomenon observed in neuronal networks involved in diverse brain activities. Neural mass models such as Wilson-Cowan (WC) and Jansen-Rit (JR) can simulate synchronized states. Although they have been studied for decades, their ability to demonstrate second-order phase transition (SOPT) and criticality has not received enough attention.Objective & methods: Two networks of…
Poster 2022#30 – Daniel KORCHINSKI – Critical neuronal avalanches without a separation of timescales [VIDEO]
The observation of power-law distributed neuronal avalanche sizes has inspired the “critical brain hypothesis”, which holds that the brain self-organizes to the critical point of a phase transition. This is proposed to be optimal for computation. However, most models of self-organized criticality lose criticality if external input is significant, i.e., when there is no longer…
Poster 2022#31 – Mahsa KHOSHKHOU – Plasticity, self-organization to the edge of synchronization transition and optimal reinforcement learning
Under generic and physiologically relevant conditions we show that self-organization to the edge of synchronization transition is achieved in networks of Izhikevich spiking neurons as a joint result of spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) and time delay associated with axonal conduction (Khoshkhou and Montakhab, Front. Sys. Neurosci. 2019). STDP is also believed to be a cornerstone…
Poster 2022#32 – Samuel LASSERS – The Flow of Axonal Information Among Hippocampal Subregions: Patterned Stimulation Increases Feedback Signaling for Routing Specificity
Hippocampal information processing between subregions is responsible for episodic learning, recall, and spatial navigation yet difficulties accessing spikes in interregional axons impede detailed understanding. Our lab has reconstructed the trisynaptic loop in vitro with isolation of axons in microfluidic channels to access spiking information between subregions. The axonal spiking dynamics and how they relate to…
Poster 2022#33 – Michael McCULLOUGH – Criticality in the developing zebrafish brain
The transparent brain of the larval zebrafish offers unique opportunities for very large-scale calcium imaging of neural activity. Exploiting this, signatures of criticality have recently been reported in whole-brain recordings. However what happens when this is broken down into individual brain regions is less clear. Using 2-photon calcium imaging of ~10,000 neurons in each of…
Poster 2022#34 – Daniel MIRANDA – Phenomenological renormalization group analysis of cortical spiking data
The critical brain hypothesis has emerged in the last decades as a fruitful theoretical framework for understanding collective neuronal phenomena. Lending support to the idea that the brain operates near a phase transition, Beggs and Plenz were the first to report experimentally recorded neuronal avalanches, whose distributions coincide with the mean-field directed percolation (DP) universality…
Poster 2022#35 – Gustavo MENESSE – Inhibition strength cannot promote phase transition (active/absorbing) in sparse neural networks
In excitable systems, such as neuronal networks, many important properties depend on inhibition mechanisms. Inhibition stabilizes network dynamics, controls activity rhythms and regulates pattern formation. For the brain and sensory systems, inhibition seems to be essential in information encoding and learning. From the perspective of Self-organized criticality, inhibition is commonly viewed as one of the…
Poster 2022#36 – Osame KINOUCHI – Homeostatic Mechanism for Quasicriticality
In self-organized criticality (SOC) models, as well as in standard phase transitions, criticality is only present for vanishing driving external fields $h \to 0$. Considering that this is rarely the case for natural systems, such a restriction poses a challenge to the explanatory power of these models. Here, we propose simple homeostatic mechanisms which promote…
Poster 2022#37 – Faheem MOSAM – Asymmetry of Random Markov Models and Applications to Brain Modelling
Biological systems need to react to stimuli over a broad spectrum of timescales. If and how this ability can emerge without external fine-tuning is a puzzle. This problem has been considered in discrete Markovian systems where results from random matrix theory could be leveraged. Indeed, generic large transition matrices are governed by universal results, which…
Poster 2022#38 – Giorgio NICOLETTI – Criticality and network structure drive emergent oscillations in a stochastic whole-brain model
Understanding the relation between the structure of brain networks and their functions is a fundamental open question. Simple models of neural activity have proven to be effective in describing features of whole-brain spontaneous activity when tuned at their critical point. Here, we show how the interplay between criticality and structural networks is crucial in driving…
Poster 2022#39 – Helena Christina PIUVEZAM – Unconventional criticality and scaling break-down in the Wilson-Cowan model
The Wilson-Cowan model is a well-known population model that represents the collective dynamics of two subpopulations: excitatory and inhibitory. It is the subject of many phase transition papers that study neuronal networks at a men-field level. The stochastic version was written in the past decade and brought with it the study of noisy dynamics, e.g.,…
Poster 2022#40 – Oliver LOPEZ CORONA – Fisher Information as unifying concept for Criticality and Antifragility, a primer hypothesis
One of the classic problems in complex systems is the existence and ubiquity of critically, characterized by scale-invariance in frequency space and a balance between emergence (randomness) and self-organization (order). Another universal characteristic of complex systems is their Antigrafility or the capacity of taking advantage from environmental randomness. Inhere we propose a primer hypothesis that…
Poster 2022#41 – Elvia RAMIREZ-CARRILLO – Potential loss of brain criticality under different lifestyles induced by the gut-brain axis
We are not individuals, we are much better described as ecosystems due to trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms that inhabit us. We now know that gut microbiota can greatly influence many physiological parameters that in turn may impact several cognitive functions, such as learning, memory, and decision making processes. This mutualistic symbiotic relation known…
Poster 2022#42 – Sue RHAMIDDA – Synchronization and information: present approach in a map-based neuron model
Synchronization is directly linked to oscillator settings and their interactions, being a behavior found in chemical, physical, and biological oscillators. Therefore, it is a quantitative method to verify the evolution of the collective behavior of coupled networks. We study synchronization, criticality, and information theory in the field of computational neuroscience in a map-based neuron model,…
Poster 2022#43 – Juan S. ROJAS – Griffiths Phase in Dynamical Networks: a Mechanism for the Emergence of Consciousness?
The brain spends most of its time around a region near a critical point. Then, we investigate the relation between the topology of the network and the emergence of the chaotic Griffith Phase using small world networks. Our work suggest a relation between neuroplasticity (conscious activity) with random connections.
Poster 2022#44 – Fernando SANTOS – Emergence of High Order Hubs in the Human Connectome
Network theory is often based on pairwise relationships between nodes, which is not necessarily realistic for modelling complex systems. Importantly, it does not accurately capture nondyadic interactions in the human brain, often considered one of the most complex systems. In this work, we develop a multivariate signal processing pipeline that allows us to build high-order…
Poster 2022#45 – Leonard SASSE – Intermediately Synchronised Brain States optimise Trade-off between Subject Identifiability and Predictive Capacity
Functional connectivity (FC) refers to the statistical dependencies between activity of distinct brain areas. To study temporal fluctuations in FC within the duration of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning session, researchers have proposed the computation of an edge time series (ETS) and their derivatives. Evidence suggests that FC is driven by a few…
Poster 2022#46 – Pierpaolo SORRENTINO – On the Topochronic Map of the Human Brain Dynamics [VIDEO]
Two structurally connected brain regions are more likely to interact, with the lengths of the structural bundles, their widths, myelination, and the topology of the structural connectome influencing the timing of the interactions. We introduce an in vivo approach, based on neuronal avalanches, for measuring functional delays across the whole brain in humans using magneto/electroencephalography…
Poster 2022#47 – John WESTBROOK – Divergence from critical branching reflects working memory load and subjective cognitive effort
Long-range temporal correlations are suppressed during cognitive tasks, suggesting that higher-order cognitive processing entails sub-criticality. We hypothesize that subjective cognitive effort reflects the degree to which brain dynamics diverge from criticality during task performance. To test our hypothesis, we collected EEG data while 85 healthy young adults performed levels N = 1—4 of the N-back…
Poster 2022#48 – Mohammad YAGHOUBI – Criticality and universality in neuronal cultures during ‘up’ and ‘down’ states
The brain can be seen as a self-organized dynamical system that optimizes its information processing and storage capabilities. This is supported by studies across scales, where neuronal activity can show critical dynamics, characterized by the emergence of scale-free statistics as captured, for example, by the sizes and durations of neuronal activity avalanches. Another phenomenon observed…
Poster 2022#49 – Galen WILKERSON – Spontaneous Emergence of Computation in Network Cascades [VIDEO]
Neuronal network computation and computation by avalanche supporting networks are of interest to the fields of physics, computer science (computation theory as well as statistical or machine learning) and neuroscience. Here we show that computation of complex Boolean functions arises spontaneously in threshold networks as a function of connectivity and antagonism (inhibition), computed by logic…
Poster 2022#50 – Maitreyee WAIRAGKAR – Ongoing Long-Range Temporal Correlations in Broadband EEG and Intracortical Neural Activity during Movement and its Application to Simulating EEG
Changes in arrhythmic broadband components of neural activity during voluntary movement are not sufficiently investigated. In our previous work we demonstrated that broadband electroencephalography (EEG) contains long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs) that show ongoing changes over short timescales during voluntary movement [1]. We characterised broadband LRTCs using detrended fluctuation analysis and modelled short- and long-range correlations…
Poster 2022#51 – Adam PONZI – Ramping Activity in the Striatum [VIDEO]
Control of the timing of behavior is thought to require the basal ganglia (BG) and BG pathologies impair performance in timing tasks. Temporal interval discrimination depends on the ramping activity of medium spiny neurons (MSN) in the main BG input structure, the striatum, but the underlying mechanisms driving this activity are unclear. Here, we combine…