The relationship between spontaneous behavioral measures and neural activity across the lateral cortex is regionally patterned.
a) Rastermap (top), first principal component (PC1; middle), and second principal component (PC2, bottom) sortings of normalized, rasterized, neuropil subtracted dF/F neural activity for 5678 cells from a single 90 min duration example side mount 2p imaging session. Each row in the display corresponds to a “superneuron”, or average of 50 adjacent neurons in the Rastermap sort (Stringer et al, 2023, bioRxiv). Low activity (z-scored) in blue, intermediate activity in green, maximum activity level in yellow. Red and blue arrowheads show alignment of walking and whisking bouts, respectively, to neural activity. White dashed box inserts indicate selections highlighted in panels c) and d). Scale bar shows color look-up map for each separately z-scored, individually displayed superneuron in the raster displays. b) Behavioral arousal primitives of walk speed, whisker motion energy, and pupil diameter shown temporally aligned to the rasterized neural activity traces in a), directly above. c) Expanded insets of top and bottom fifths of rasterized PC1 sorting from the middle segment of panel a), with mean activity traces shown above each. Red and blue arrowheads indicate the same walking and whisking bouts, respectively, as in a) and b). Horizontal black bar indicates time of expanded inset shown in Fig. S5. d) Normalized density of neurons in each CCF area belonging to two example Rastermap sorted groups (d1, left, red: MIN=0%, MAX=34%; d2, right, blue: MIN=0%, MAX=32%), with rasterized activities shown in corresponding labeled white dashed boxes in the top segment of panel a). Only cells in selected Rastermap groups are shown. The type of behavioral arousal primitive (i.e. walk and whisk, left, in red; whisk, right, in blue) that was typically concurrent with high neural activity is shown below each Rastermap group’s CCF density map. e) Normalized mean correlations of neural activity and walk speed (left, red; mean: MIN=0.01, MAX=0.06; standard deviation: MIN=0.000, MAX=0.029) and whisker motion energy (right, blue; mean: MIN=0.01, MAX=0.08; standard deviation: MIN=0.000, MAX=0.043) per CCF area for this example session. Mean walk speed correlations with neural activity (dF/F) were significantly more than zero (p<0.001, median t(5677)=4.4, single-sample t-test; python: scipy.stats.ttest_1samp) for 20 of the 24 CCF areas with at least 20 neurons present. The areas with mean correlations not significantly larger than zero were left VISp, right SSpn, right AUDpo, and right TEa. Mean whisker motion energy correlations with neural activity (dF/F) were significantly more than zero (p<0.001, median t(5677)=7.0, single-sample t-test) for 21 of the 24 CCF areas with at least 20 neurons present. The areas with mean correlations not significantly larger than zero were right SSpn, right AUDpo, and right TEa. PC = principal component, ME = motion energy, au = arbitrary units, M2 = secondary motor cortex, S1b = primary somatosensory barrel cortex, V1 = primary visual cortex, A1 = primary auditory cortex.