Complementary congruent and opposite neurons achieve concurrent multisensory integration and segregation
- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
- East China Normal University, China
- Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
- Carnegie Mellon University, United States
- Peking University, China
Abstract
Our brain perceives the world by exploiting multisensory cues to extract information about various aspects of external stimuli. The sensory cues from the same stimulus should be integrated to improve perception, and otherwise segregated to distinguish different stimuli. In reality, however, the brain faces the challenge of recognizing stimuli without knowing in advance the sources of sensory cues. To address this challenge, we propose that the brain conducts integration and segregation concurrently with complementary neurons. Studying the inference of heading-direction via visual and vestibular cues, we develop a network model with two reciprocally connected modules modelling interacting visual-vestibular areas. In each module, there are two groups of neurons whose tunings under each sensory cue are either congruent or opposite. We show that congruent neurons implement integration, while opposite neurons compute cue disparity information for segregation, and the interplay between two groups of neurons achieves efficient multisensory information processing.
Data availability
The submitted manuscript presents a theoretical network modelling work. All codes used in this study has been uploaded to GitHub (https://github.com/wenhao-z/Opposite_neuron) and could be openly accessed.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (N HKUST606/12)
- K Y Michael Wong
Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (605813)
- K Y Michael Wong
Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (16322616)
- K Y Michael Wong
Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (16306817)
- K Y Michael Wong
National Basic Research Program of China (2014CB846101)
- Si Wu
Natural Science Foundation of China (31261160495)
- Si Wu
National Science Foundation (CISE1320651)
- Tai Sing Lee
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (D16PC00007)
- Tai Sing Lee
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2019, Zhang 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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Complementary congruent and opposite neurons achieve concurrent multisensory integration and segregation
eLife 8:e43753.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.43753
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