Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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A core observation in many memory systems and tasks is the presence of oscillations during memory maintenance. However, the mechanistic role of such oscillations is unclear. Non-oscillatory models of short-term memory storage are able to encode stimulus identity through their patterns of neural activity. However, such models are typically either bistable, limiting their information storage capability to all-or-none representations, or exhibit extreme fine tuning to represent more graded information. In this talk, I will illustrate a dynamical mechanism by which the presence of oscillatory inputs to a neural circuit can convert a binary storage circuit to one capable of robustly storing multi-level information.