AMUSE

Date: November 15, 2017

Time: 7:00PM - 7:15PM

Location: BLOC 220

Speaker: Angelique Morvant, Undergraduate Student, Texas A&M University, Department of Mathematics

Title: Neural Ideals and Receptive Fields

Abstract: Place cells are neurons in the brain that fire when an animal is in a given location, allowing the animal to navigate its environment. The area in which a particular cell fires is called its receptive field, and current research focuses on determining how the firing of place cells encodes spatial information about receptive fields. One way to represent the firing patterns of neurons is by a mathematical object called a neural ideal; the presence of certain polynomials in this ideal gives information about the relationships among the receptive fields. However, it may also be useful to know when the converse is true; that is, when do receptive field relationships tell us which polynomials are in the corresponding neural ideal? The answer to that question is the subject of this talk.