Patterned perturbation of inhibition can reveal the dynamical structure of neural processing
- Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Abstract
Perturbation of neuronal activity is key to understanding the brain's functional properties, however, intervention studies typically perturb neurons in a nonspecific manner. Recent optogenetics techniques have enabled patterned perturbations, in which specific patterns of activity can be invoked in identified target neurons to reveal more specific cortical function. Here, we argue that patterned perturbation of neurons is in fact necessary to reveal the specific dynamics of inhibitory stabilization, emerging in cortical networks with strong excitatory and inhibitory functional subnetworks, as recently reported in mouse visual cortex. We propose a specific perturbative signature of these networks and investigate how this can be measured under different experimental conditions. Functionally, rapid spontaneous transitions between selective ensembles of neurons emerge in such networks, consistent with experimental results. Our study outlines the dynamical and functional properties of feature-specific inhibitory-stabilized networks, and suggests experimental protocols that can be used to detect them in the intact cortex.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
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Author details
Funding
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/N013956/1)
- Claudia Clopath
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/N019008/1)
- Claudia Clopath
Wellcome (200790/Z/16/Z)
- Claudia Clopath
Simons Foundation (564408)
- Claudia Clopath
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/R035806/1)
- Claudia Clopath
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Sadeh & Clopath
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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Patterned perturbation of inhibition can reveal the dynamical structure of neural processing
eLife 9:e52757.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52757
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
