Hebb's Vision: The Structural Underpinnings of Hebbian Assemblies.

ABSTRACT: In 1949, Donald Hebb proposed that groups of neurons that activate stereotypically form the organizational building blocks of perception, cognition, and behavior. Finding the structural underpinning of such assemblies has been technically challenging, due to a lack of large-scale structure-activity maps. Here, we analyze this relation using a novel dataset that links in vivo optical physiology to connectivity using postmortem electron microscopy (EM). From the fluorescence traces, we extract neural assemblies from higher-order correlations in neural activity. Physiologically, we show that these assemblies exhibit properties consistent with Hebb's theory, including more reliable responses to repeated natural movie inputs than size-matched random ensembles and superior decoding of visual sti

SUBMITTER: Wagner-Carena J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12258723 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature