Cortical response states for enhanced sensory discrimination
- University of Texas, Houston, United States
Abstract
Brain activity during wakefulness is characterized by rapid fluctuations in neuronal responses. Whether these fluctuations play any role in modulating the accuracy of behavioral responses is poorly understood. Here, we investigated whether and how trial changes in the population response impact sensory coding in monkey V1 and perceptual performance. Although the responses of individual neurons varied widely across trials, many cells tended to covary with the local population. When population activity was in a 'low' state, neurons had lower evoked responses and correlated variability, yet higher probability to predict perceptual accuracy. The impact of firing rate fluctuations on network and perceptual accuracy was strongest 200-ms before stimulus presentation, and it greatly diminished when the number of cells used to measure the state of the population was decreased. These findings indicate that enhanced perceptual discrimination occurs when population activity is in a 'silent' response mode in which neurons increase information extraction.
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Funding
National Institutes of Health (1R01EY026156)
- Valentin Dragoi
National Institute of Mental Health (5R01MH086919)
- Valentin Dragoi
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols of the University of Texas Health Science Center (protocol number AWC-17-0072). All surgery was performed under isofluorane anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2017, Gutnisky et al.
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.
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Cortical response states for enhanced sensory discrimination
eLife 6:e29226.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29226
