Response outcome gates the effect of spontaneous corticalstate fluctuations on perceptual decisions
- Champalimaud Foundation, Portugal
Abstract
Sensory responses of cortical neurons are more discriminable when evoked on a baseline of desynchronized spontaneous activity, but cortical desynchronization has not generally been associated with more accurate perceptual decisions. Here we show that mice perform more accurate auditory judgements when activity in the auditory cortex is elevated and desynchronized before stimulus onset, but only if the previous trial was an error, and that this relationship is occluded if previous outcome is ignored. We confirmed that the outcome-dependent effect of brain state on performance is neither due to idiosyncratic associations between the slow components of either signal, nor to the existence of specific cortical states evident only after errors. Instead, errors appear to gate the effect of cortical state fluctuations on discrimination accuracy. Neither facial movements nor pupil size during the baseline were associated with accuracy, but they were predictive of measures of responsivity, such as the probability of not responding to the stimulus or of responding prematurely. These results suggest that the functional role of cortical state on behavior is dynamic and constantly regulated by performance monitoring systems.
Data availability
All data and code necessary to reproduce the main findings of this manuscript are deposited on Dryad (https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.w0vt4b8vf).
-
Response outcome gates the effect of spontaneous cortical state fluctuations on perceptual decisionsDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.w0vt4b8vf.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Postdoctoral fellowship,SFRH/BPD/119737/2016)
- Davide Reato
H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (Postdoctoral fellowship,H2020-MSCA-IF-2016 75381)
- Davide Reato
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Doctoral fellowships)
- Raphael Steinfeld
Fundação Champalimaud
- Alfonso Renart
Marie Curie Career Integration Grant (PCIG11-GA-2012-322339)
- Alfonso Renart
Human Frontier Science Program (Young Investigator Award,RGY0089)
- Alfonso Renart
EU FP7 (ICT-2011-9-600925)
- Alfonso Renart
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 reviewed and approved by the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown animalwelfare committee and approved by the Portuguese Direção Geral de Veterinária (Ref. No.6090421/000/000/2019).
Copyright
© 2023, Reato 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.
Metrics
-
- 689
- views
-
- 92
- downloads
-
- 4
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Response outcome gates the effect of spontaneous corticalstate fluctuations on perceptual decisions
eLife 12:e81774.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81774
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Learning alters cortical representations and improves perception. Apical tuft dendrites in cortical layer 1, which are unique in their connectivity and biophysical properties, may be a key site of learning-induced plasticity. We used both two-photon and SCAPE microscopy to longitudinally track tuft-wide calcium spikes in apical dendrites of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in barrel cortex as mice learned a tactile behavior. Mice were trained to discriminate two orthogonal directions of whisker stimulation. Reinforcement learning, but not repeated stimulus exposure, enhanced tuft selectivity for both directions equally, even though only one was associated with reward. Selective tufts emerged from initially unresponsive or low-selectivity populations. Animal movement and choice did not account for changes in stimulus selectivity. Enhanced selectivity persisted even after rewards were removed and animals ceased performing the task. We conclude that learning produces long-lasting realignment of apical dendrite tuft responses to behaviorally relevant dimensions of a task.
-
- Neuroscience
Multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) allows genome-scale imaging of RNAs in individual cells in intact tissues. To date, MERFISH has been applied to image thin-tissue samples of ~10 µm thickness. Here, we present a thick-tissue three-dimensional (3D) MERFISH imaging method, which uses confocal microscopy for optical sectioning, deep learning for increasing imaging speed and quality, as well as sample preparation and imaging protocol optimized for thick samples. We demonstrated 3D MERFISH on mouse brain tissue sections of up to 200 µm thickness with high detection efficiency and accuracy. We anticipate that 3D thick-tissue MERFISH imaging will broaden the scope of questions that can be addressed by spatial genomics.
