Amplitude modulations of cortical sensory responses in pulsatile evidence accumulation
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.
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Amplitude modulations of sensory responses, and deviations from Weber's Law in pulsatile evidence accumulationDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.tb2rbnzxv.
Article and author information
Author details
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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