Farzaneh Najafi

The paper shows that ramping neural activity in visual and parietal cortex during passive behavior results from stimulus-evoked dynamics, not predictive processing.

The paper develops RNNs that incorporate biological constraints like Dale's law and structured connectivity to better model cortical function and validate insights through mouse calcium imaging data.

The paper examines spike reliability in cortical neurons, finding that parvalbumin+ interneurons show high reliability, while excitatory neurons show lower reliability, with functional implications for inhibition and spiking rate coding.

The paper shows that unexpected events trigger contextual signaling in VIP and excitatory neurons in the visual cortex, using the Allen Institute dataset and dimensionality reduction techniques.

The paper identifies diverse functional neuron types in the visual cortex that process novel and familiar stimuli in mice.

The paper shows excitatory and inhibitory neurons in mice are equally selective during decision-making and develop similar selectivity changes during learning.

CaImAn, an open-source library, automates motion correction, source extraction, deconvolution and cross-session registration for calcium imaging, detecting neurons near human level (F1 0.75 batch, 0.76 online).