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Xiaoge Bao (IDIBAPS)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Understanding how structural connectivity, together with intrinsic dynamics, shapes neural activity is one of the central problems in theoretical neuroscience. Large-scale brain rate models provide a bridge between anatomical connectomes and neural dynamics. However, it remains unclear how anatomical connectivity, excitatory--inhibitory interactions, and region-specific intrinsic time...
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Dr Marta Boscaglia (University of Leicester, School of Psychology and Vision Sciences, Leicester, United Kingdom)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
The ability to form associations between related items is fundamental for episodic memory. In the hippocampus, single-neuron recordings in humans suggest that memories are represented by overlapping neuronal assemblies, in which shared neurons encode associations between distinct but related items. Furthermore, theoretical work using static attractor networks has demonstrated that such...
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Michele Allegra (Department of Physics and Astronomy and Padova Neuroscience Center, Università di Padova)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
A major challenge in systems neuroscience is understanding how external perturbations interact with ongoing brain activity. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), increasingly used in both basic and clinical neuroscience and often combined with electroencephalography (EEG), provides a unique opportunity to probe this interaction. However, how intrinsic dynamics constrain the propagation of...
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Nicola Mendini (University of Sheffield)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Cortical sensory maps vary across species. In visual cortex, some animals organise neuronal preferences into smooth topological maps, whereas others show a salt-and-pepper-like arrangement. Both architectures can support sensory coding, but it remains unclear why evolution favours one organisation over the other. We propose that these architectures represent alternative solutions to a...
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Mr Lars Schutzeichel (Juelich Research Centre, Juelich, Germany - International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Low-rank recurrent networks are a mathematically tractable framework for relating connectivity to activity in biological and artificial neural networks. Such networks produce low-dimensional activity, consistent with brain recordings during cognitive tasks, and despite their simplicity can implement a variety of complex computations. How learning shapes their connectivity to do so, however,...
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Elisa Tentori (Università degli Studi di Padova)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Closed-loop control of cortical population activity is increasingly investigated for circuit-specific neuromodulation and neural prostheses, and as a causal tool to probe learning and plasticity. Classical control theory, however, requires prior knowledge of circuit connectivity and dynamics (Gu,2015). Baggio, 2019 showed that finite-horizon controllers can instead be learned directly from...
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Dmitrii Perevozniuk (Center for Bio- and Medical Technologies)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Cross-excitation (CE) – non-synaptic coupling between somata of primary sensory neurons in dorsal root ganglia – is highly prevalent among A-type (mechanoreceptive) fibers but nearly absent in C-type (nociceptive) fibers, hinting at a functional role in somatosensory processing. Its computational contribution, however, remains unclear, as well as underlying biophysical mechanisms. We built a...
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Luca Taffarello (Padova Neuroscience Center, University of Padova, Padova, Italy)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
The increasing availability of large clinical neuroimaging datasets has enabled the discovery of objective, data-driven clinical phenotypes. However, current approaches typically rely on structural or static functional metrics, thereby overlooking the rich information embedded in brain dynamics. To overcome this limitation, we developed a computational framework combining Gaussian **Hidden...
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Beatriz Mizusaki (SISSA)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Midbrain circuits through the superior colliculus (SC) are involved in rapid threat response to visual stimuli. However, the precise mechanisms that allow these critical visuo-motor computations to take place in uncertain, varying scenarios are still unknown. We analyse data from longitudinal recordings on free moving mice, where visual stimuli were shown via a screen, and subsequent...
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Alberto Antonietti (Politecnico di Milano), Daniel Ariselli (Politecnico di Milano), Paolo Marzolo (Politecnico di Milano)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Low-intensity focused ultrasound offers a non-invasive route to modulate neural activity with high spatial selectivity, but its cellular mechanisms remain unresolved and parameter-dependent. The SEVERUS project addresses this gap by testing alternative, non-exclusive hypotheses for focused ultrasound stimulation in neuronal networks.
We hypothesize that focused ultrasound can...
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Ms Zuzanna Szpak (University of Padova)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Recognition memory for numerical quantities requires neural systems to encode, maintain, and compare numerosity information over time. Neurophysiological studies in non-human primates have identified specialized neuronal populations associated with these processes. Here, we use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as computational models to investigate whether and how similar functional...
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Emanuele Agrimi (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca), Francesca Giuffrida (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Brain coordination is typically studied one pair at a time, yet pairwise functional connectivity cannot capture coordination among three or more regions beyond their pairwise couplings. When higher-order structure is detected, two questions remain: whether it is irreducible to its lower-order parts, and whether it is better described as a simplicial complex, a group supported by all its...
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Mattia Stefano (Sensory Processing and Computation Research Unit, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Dendritic integration is fundamental for information processing in the brain. Each dendrite combines different synaptic inputs in a nonlinear fashion, selectively producing events only in response to specific spatiotemporal patterns of synaptic activation. As a consequence, the generation of action potentials is partly controlled by the spatial arrangement of synaptic spines across the...
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Giulia Lorenzini (Department of Physics, University of Turin, Turin, Italy)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Memory integration in the hippocampus is central to constructing coherent representations of environments that unfold across space and time. Beyond current position, hippocampal activity has been proposed to approximate a predictive, decision-oriented map of future states, supporting anticipation of possible trajectories (Stachenfeld et al., 2017). Here, we asked whether CA1 population...
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Mr Giacomo Amerio (Department of Mathematics, Informatics and Geosciences, University of Trieste; Neuroscience Area, SISSA, Trieste), Mr Giovanni Lucarelli (Department of Mathematics, Informatics and Geosciences, University of Trieste), Mr Andrea Spinelli (Department of Mathematics, Informatics and Geosciences, University of Trieste)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Neural network models are primarily characterized by three ingredients: architecture, training objective and training dataset. While research on neural predictivity has largely explored the first two components, dataset choice may offer substantial improvements when modelling the rodent visual cortex, since standard images differ markedly from the low-acuity visual input received by a mouse....
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Dr Paulo Protachevicz (State University of Ponta Grossa)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Neuronal synchronisation is essential for effective brain communication, but abnormal connectivity changes can lead to hypersynchronized states associated with epileptic seizures. In this regard, the activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (ARC) has been implicated in synaptic alterations related to epilepsy. For this reason, we investigated how ARC-immunoreactive neurons (IAINs)...
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37. Internal Noise Reorganizes Dynamics in Recurrent Neural Networks for Robust Sensorimotor ControlMr Francesco Damiani (SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies), Universitat Pompeu Fabra)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Sensorimotor systems in humans and other animals sustain complex and adaptive behavior by continuously integrating noisy sensory feedback with internal states and behavioral goals. This behavior is remarkably reliable despite variability affecting every stage of the perception-action loop, from stochastic body and environmental dynamics to sensory and motor noise, as well as fluctuations in...
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Michele Allegra (Department of Physics and Astronomy and Padova Neuroscience Center, Università di Padova)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
In recent years, neural activity has increasingly been investigated from a geometric viewpoint, analyzing the neural manifold onto which neural trajectories unfold. From this perspective, a key property is the neural manifold’ intrinsic dimension (ID), which encapsulates the relation between individual units and collective activity, and hence the overall complexity of the neural code. However,...
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Ana Paula da Silva Koltun (Federal University of Sao Paulo)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is a technique for modulating cortical oscillations. The external application of electrical currents can influence cortical excitability and activity. But how the electric fields interact with individual neurons remains poorly understood. Thus, we use a biophysically and morphologically detailed model of human cortical pyramidal neurons and...
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Marco Celotto (Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (MA), USA; Institute for Neural Information Processing, Center for Molecular Neurobiology (ZMNH), University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), Hamburg, Germany)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Brain computations arise from interactions between neuronal populations distributed across regions. Communication subspaces have become a standard tool to map these interactions with cellular resolution, capturing the additive coupling between a source and a target population of many neurons through a small number of activity patterns. However, interactions are not static: they are reshaped by...
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Sara Tomasi (Padova Neuroscience Center (PNC), Department of Information Engineering (DEI), University of Padova (Unipd))9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Synchronization- and metastability-related measures have been proposed as complementary descriptors of large-scale brain dynamics beyond conventional static functional connectivity. However, their reliability under realistic resting-state acquisition protocols remains insufficiently characterized, limiting their application as neuroimaging biomarkers, particularly in multimodal studies with...
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Elif Duran (SISSA)9/22/26, 3:30 PMPoster
Perception of stimulus duration depends on sensory input statistics. Longer vibrotactile stimuli are perceived as more intense by rats and humans (Fassihi et al., 2017), and stronger stimuli are perceived as lasting longer (Toso et al., 2021). To explain these bidirectional biases, we have proposed leaky integrators for intensity and duration: input from the sensory cortex is accumulated over...
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Paolo Scaccia (Paris Vision Institute, Sorbonne University)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Sensory neurons collectively encode stimulus information through patterns of correlated activity. A key — yet theoretically unresolved — observation is that neurons with similar stimulus tuning consistently show the strongest noise correlations. Existing frameworks fail to explain this structure, leaving a fundamental gap in our understanding.
We address this gap by introducing a fully...
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Francesco De Santis (Politecnico di Milano)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
The Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) is a far-field EEG signal recorded from scalp electrodes to assess the integrity of the auditory pathway. Elicited by brief acoustic stimuli, the ABR reflects the activation of successive auditory brainstem nuclei and constitutes one of the most widely used clinical tools for hearing assessment. Despite its extensive clinical use, the relationship between...
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Alberto Antonietti (Politecnico di Milano), Paolo Marzolo (Politecnico di Milano), Claudia Casellato (University of Pavia), Daniel Ariselli (Politecnico di Milano)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
We present a biologically grounded spiking closed-loop controller for investigating adaptive motor control. The controller was designed to actuate a robotic arm through the interaction of multiple brain-inspired modules, including a premotor planning module for trajectory generation, a primary motor cortex module for motor-command production and feedback correction, state estimation, and...
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Dr Ana Flò (Area Science Park), Dr Matteo Biagetti (Area Science Park)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
How mouse primary visual cortex (V1) represents time-varying stimuli is typically studied either through pairwise correlations or through black-box decoders that generalise poorly across animals. We ask whether the temporal reconfiguration of higher-order co-activation patterns carries stimulus information that these approaches miss, and whether topological data analysis can summarise it...
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Dr Carles Martorell9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
arge-scale brain activity is increasingly described in terms of spatiotemporal modes that capture coordinated neural dynamics across space and time. Such modes can be derived from diverse approaches, including structure-based decompositions informed by cortical geometry or anatomical connectivity, as well as data-driven techniques such as PCA, complex PCA (CPCA), frequency-domain PCA (fdPCA),...
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Ms Aiswarya Panikkassery (SISSA)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Perceptual sensitivity in the visual domain pertains to the ability to detect informative features in visual scenes. As per efficient coding framework, this is achieved by becoming tuned to the statistical regularities of its environment. These regularities can be described as local correlations in light distribution, known as multipoint correlations. Previous studies characterized natural...
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Safaa Mamoun Adbelmageid Ali (SISSA)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Brain aging is characterized by cognitive decline related to progressive synaptic degradation. In zebrafish, aging progression resembles human one, making these fish an intriguing model to explore the interplay among aging, behaviour, synaptic integrity and environmental stress. We combined zebrafish deep learning based behavioral analysis of the two phases of behavioral experiment...
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Kaining Zhang9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Economic choice involves comparing the subjective values of goods, a process linked to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Neurophysiological studies have identified OFC neurons encoding variables that capture both the inputs and outputs of this process, such as the offer values and the chosen goods. However, the precise nature of these representations and the circuit mechanisms that give rise to...
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Michele Valla (Biorobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa.)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Identifying cell assemblies from multi-unit recordings is a fundamental challenge in systems neuroscience. Most existing methods focus on detecting co-excited neurons, but neural circuits also involve inhibitory interactions, where the activation of an assembly can systematically suppress the firing of some of its members. Here we present a cell assembly detection algorithm that identifies...
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Persia Jana Kamali (Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Recurrent connectivity is widely thought to support cognitive functions that require activity to persist beyond the timescale of sensory input, including working memory and delayed-response behavior. Classical theoretical models of recurrent neural networks, from the Hopfield model to more biologically detailed variants, have shown how recurrent architectures can implement distributed memory...
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Lorenzo Tausani (SISSA)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Rodent vision has traditionally been considered simple and dominated by low-level feature extraction. This view has been recently challenged by evidence of a hierarchical visual system in rats, functionally analogous to the primate ventral stream, in which higher-order areas show reduced sensitivity to low-level attributes (e.g., luminance) and increased invariance to geometric transformations...
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Daniele Tirinnanzi (SISSA)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Humans and animals often engage in behaviors not driven by immediate extrinsic rewards, such as exploring novel objects. This tendency to be curious, conserved across species, is thought to depend on intrinsic motivation, described in psychology as a general-purpose mechanism supporting adaptation to changing environments. Meanwhile, the AI community has incorporated intrinsic motivation into...
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Monica Paoletti (SISSA)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
The brain constantly interprets the world by combining incoming sensory information with prior knowledge, updating its beliefs as circumstances evolve. This process is captured by Bayesian inference, and its proper functioning determines whether an organism adapts flexibly to uncertainty or falls into systematic biases through faulty beliefs or maladaptive updating. Our main focus is to...
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Juliana Londono Alvarez (SISSA, Brown University)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Brains routinely generate highly flexible and complex behaviors on a relatively stable structure and limited resources. A key mechanism underlying this ability is compositionality, which allows the brain to efficiently decompose complex tasks into simpler, reusable primitives. While network modularity has often been linked to compositionality in biological and artificial networks, a rigorous...
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Matteo De Matola (Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a powerful tool to modulate human brain function in a non-invasive fashion, with great potential for basic research and therapeutic applications. However, its effects may vary with pre-stimulus functional states (pFSs). This state dependency injects variability in TMS results, reducing their reproducibility and calling for experimental control. One...
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Emanuele Agrimi (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca), Carlo Orientale Caputo (International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA))9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Coordination across brain regions is usually summarised by pairwise functional connectivity (FC), which cannot capture how three or more regions act together beyond their pairwise couplings. Pairwise maximum-entropy (Ising) models reproduce many patterns but miss informative interactions. We ask which higher-order structure the data support, using Minimally Complex Models (MCMs):...
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silvia scarpetta (Dept. of Physics "E.R.Caianiello", University of Salerno, Italy)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
To investigate both the storage of phase-coded oscillatory patterns, and the scale-free behaviour near the transition between the replay and not-replay regimes, we study a modular spiking neural network composed of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons and governed by spike-timing-dependent plasticity. Our model stores modular spatiotemporal patterns both at the mesoscopic level (sequences of...
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Giulia Lund (Scuola Superiore di Studi Avanzati - SISSA)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
How do we understand each other? Inferring communicative intentions – such as clarification requests, invitations, orders, statements – is fundamental to social interaction. Without this ability, a question like "Can you pass me the salt?" would be met with a literal "Yes, I can" rather than the intended action.
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Crucially, in face-to-face interaction, inferring intentions relies not only on... -
Mr Maxim Zewe (International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA))9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Understanding how the visual system extracts and represents information is a fundamental prerequisite for studying cognitive processes that depend on vision, such as time perception. Yet, defining and controlling the amount of information in, for instance, natural images is a daunting task, owing to their rich, high-dimensional statistical structure, which is further complicated by their...
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Lucia Zanetti (SISSA)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Computational, theoretical, and systems neuroscience increasingly rely on abstract models, simulations, and large-scale datasets. This creates a responsibility to properly train students and early-stage researchers, the next generation of neuroscientists, who will encounter such data in their scientific practice. Before analysing complex neural datasets, learners should have the opportunity to...
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Ludovica de Paolis (SISSA)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
In computational vision science, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have
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emerged as a popular model of biological vision because of the alignment they
can exhibit with neural and behavioral data in humans and animals. However, it
is unclear to what extent this alignment persists for visual tasks that stray from
the canonical object recognition with well-defined semantic content. In this... -
Sara Varetti (International School For Advanced Studies (SISSA))9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
![enter image description here][1]
Cortical activity displays a hierarchy of timescales along the anatomical hierarchy, thought to support information integration over multiple timescales. Clustered network architecture has been shown to generate heterogeneous timescales and support temporal fluctuations when the clustering of neurons is substantial.Working memory relies on long...
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Benedetta Mariani (University of Padova)9/23/26, 3:45 PMPoster
Characterizing directed connections between brain regions is fundamental for understanding the brain’s network organization and how it supports cognitive processes. However, a reliable methodology allowing assessment of effective connectivity (EC) at the whole-brain level and across high-resolution parcellations has remained elusive. Here, using fMRI data from the Human Connectome Project...
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