Multiple timescales at the core of short-term sensory history effects.
(A) Schematics of activity bump dynamics in the WM vs PPC network. Whereas the WM responds quickly to external inputs, the bump in the PPC drifts slowly and adapts, until it is extinguished and a new bump forms. (B) The location of the activity bump in both the PPC (pink line) and the WM (purple line) networks, immediately before the onset of the second stimulus s2 of each trial. This location corresponds to the amplitude of the stimulus being encoded. The bump in the WM network closely represents the stimulus s1 (shown in colored dots, each color corresponding to a different delay interval). The PPC network, instead, being slower to integrate inputs, displays a continuous drift of the activity bump across a few trials, before it jumps to a new stimulus location, due to the combined effect of inhibition from incoming inputs and adaptation that extinguishes previous activity. (C) Fraction of trials in which the bump location corresponds to the base stimulus that has been presented in the current trial, as well as the two preceding trials . In the WM network, in the majority of trials, the bump coincides with the first stimulus of the current trial . In a smaller fraction of the trials, it corresponds to the previous stimulus , due to the input from the PPC. In the PPC network instead, a smaller fraction of trials consist of the activity bump coinciding with the current stimulus . Relative to the WM network, the bump is more likely to coincide with the previous trial’s comparison stimulus . (D) During the inter-stimulus delay interval, in the absence of external sensory inputs, the activity bump in the WM network is mainly sustained endogenously by the recurrent inputs. It may, however, be destabilized by the continual integration of inputs from the PPC. (E) As a result, with an increasing delay interval, given that more errors are made, contraction bias increases. Green (orange) bars correspond to the performance in Bias+ (Bias-) regions, relative to the mean performance over all pairs (Fig. 1 C). (F) Left and middle: longer delay intervals allow for a longer integration times which in turn lead to a larger frequency of WM disruptions due to previous trials, leading to a larger previous-trial attractive biases (2s vs. 6s vs. 10s). Right: Weak repulsive effects for larger delays become apparent. Colored dots correspond to the bias computed for different values of the inter-stimulus delay interval, while colored lines correspond to their linear fits. (G) When neuronal adaptation is at its lowest in the PPC i.e. following a bump jump, the WM bump is maximally susceptible to inputs from the PPC. The attractive bias (towards previous stimuli) is present in trials in which the PPC network underwent a jump in the previous trial (black triangles, with black line a linear fit). Such biases are absent in trials where no jumps occur in the PPC in the previous trial (black dots, with dashed line a linear fit). Colored lines correspond to bias for specific pairs of stimuli in the current trial, regular lines for the jump condition, and dashed for the no jump condition.