1. Neuroscience

Amplitude modulations of cortical sensory responses in pulsatile evidence accumulation

  1. Sue Ann Koay
  2. Stephan Thiberge
  3. Carlos D Brody  Is a corresponding author
  4. David W Tank  Is a corresponding author
  1. Princeton University, United States
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60628
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  1. Sue Ann Koay
  2. Stephan Thiberge
  3. Carlos D Brody
  4. David W Tank
(2020)
Amplitude modulations of cortical sensory responses in pulsatile evidence accumulation
eLife 9:e60628.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60628
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Abstract

How does the brain internally represent a sequence of sensory information that jointly drives a decision-making behavior? Studies of perceptual decision-making have often assumed that sensory cortices provide noisy but otherwise veridical sensory inputs to downstream processes that accumulate and drive decisions. However, sensory processing in even the earliest sensory cortices can be systematically modified by various external and internal contexts. We recorded from neuronal populations across posterior cortex as mice performed a navigational decision-making task based on accumulating randomly timed pulses of visual evidence. Even in V1, only a small fraction of active neurons had sensory-like responses time-locked to each pulse. Here we focus on how these 'cue-locked' neurons exhibited a variety of amplitude modulations from sensory to cognitive, notably by choice and accumulated evidence. These task-related modulations affected a large fraction of cue-locked neurons across posterior cortex, suggesting that future models of behavior should account for such influences.

Data availability

A condensed set of imaging and behavioral data as well as secondary results from analyses and modeling have been deposited in Dryad with the DOI: doi:10.5061/dryad.tb2rbnzxv. This dataset contains all information required to reproduce figures in the manuscript. As the full, raw data generated in this study is extremely large, access to this raw data can be arranged upon reasonable request to the authors.

The following data sets were generated

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Sue Ann Koay

    Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9648-2475

  2. Stephan Thiberge

    Bezos Center for Neural Dynamics, Princeton University, Princeton, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6583-6613

  3. Carlos D Brody

    Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States
    For correspondence
    brody@princeton.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-4201-561X

  4. David W Tank

    Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, United States
    For correspondence
    dwtank@princeton.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9423-4267

Funding

National Institutes of Health (5U01NS090541)

  • Sue Ann Koay
  • Stephan Thiberge
  • Carlos D Brody
  • David W Tank

National Institutes of Health (1U19NS104648)

  • Sue Ann Koay
  • Stephan Thiberge
  • Carlos D Brody
  • David W Tank

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 procedures were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at Princeton University and were performed in accordance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (National Research Council et al. 2011). All surgeries were performed under isoflurane anesthesia, every effort was made to minimize suffering, and all experimental animals were group housed in enriched environments.

Copyright

© 2020, Koay 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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  1. Sue Ann Koay
  2. Stephan Thiberge
  3. Carlos D Brody
  4. David W Tank
(2020)
Amplitude modulations of cortical sensory responses in pulsatile evidence accumulation
eLife 9:e60628.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60628

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60628

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