Stimulus background influences phase invariant coding by correlated neural activity

Abstract
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Abstract

We recently reported that correlations between the activities of peripheral afferents mediate a phase invariant representation of natural communication stimuli that is refined across successive processing stages thereby leading to perception and behavior in the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus (Metzen et al., 2016). Here, we explore how phase invariant coding and perception of natural communication stimuli are affected by changes in the sinusoidal background over which they occur. We found that increasing background frequency led to phase locking, which decreased both detectability and phase invariant coding. Correlated afferent activity was a much better predictor of behavior as assessed from both invariance and detectability than single neuron activity. Thus, our results not only provide further evidence that correlated activity likely determines perception of natural communication signals, but also provide a novel explanation as to why these preferentially occur on top of low frequency as well as low intensity sinusoidal backgrounds.

Data availability

The following data sets were generated

1. Michael G. Metzen
2. Maurice J. Chacron
(2017) Data from: The effects of background on detection and phase invariant coding by correlated neural activity
Available at Dryad Digital Repository under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

http://datadryad.org/review?doi=doi:10.5061/dryad.7pt59

Article and author information

Author details

Michael G Metzen

Department of Physiology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2365-4192
Maurice J Chacron

Department of Physiology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

For correspondence
maurice.chacron@mcgill.ca

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3032-452X

Funding

Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Operating grant)

Maurice J Chacron

Canada Research Chairs

Maurice J Chacron

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures were approved by McGill University's animal care committee under protocol number 5285.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.