The Eyes Reflect an Internal Cognitive State Hidden in the Population Activity of Cortical Neurons
The Eyes Reflect an Internal Cognitive State Hidden in the Population Activity of Cortical Neurons
复制标题
DOI：
10.1093/cercor/bhab418
复制
发表时间：
2021-12-29
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Smith, Matthew A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Johnston, Richard;Snyder, Adam C.;Smith, Matthew A.
几十年的研究表明，全球的大脑状态，如唤醒，可以通过测量眼睛的属性来索引。整个大脑神经元的尖峰反应与瞳孔、小的注视扫视和眼球运动的活力有关，但很难分离出内部状态如何影响眼睛，反之亦然。在记录视觉和前额叶皮层（PFC）中的神经元群体时，我们最近发现了一种被称为“慢漂移”的神经活动的潜在维度，这似乎反映了全球大脑状态的转变。在这里，我们询问了在不同的行为任务中，缓慢漂移是否与眼睛的动作相关。当猴子执行变化检测任务时，我们记录了视觉皮层（V4），当它们执行记忆引导的扫视任务时，我们记录了PFC。在这两项任务中，缓慢漂移与瞳孔的大小和微扫视率有关，这是动物内部状态的两个外部指标。这些结果表明，与眼睛的动作相关的度量与神经活动的主导和任务无关模式相关联，该模式可以在整个皮层的神经元的群体活动中访问。
Decades of research have shown that global brain states such as arousal can be indexed by measuring the properties of the eyes. The spiking responses of neurons throughout the brain have been associated with the pupil, small fixational saccades, and vigor in eye movements, but it has been difficult to isolate how internal states affect the eyes, and vice versa. While recording from populations of neurons in the visual and prefrontal cortex (PFC), we recently identified a latent dimension of neural activity called "slow drift," which appears to reflect a shift in a global brain state. Here, we asked if slow drift is correlated with the action of the eyes in distinct behavioral tasks. We recorded from visual cortex (V4) while monkeys performed a change detection task, and PFC, while they performed a memory-guided saccade task. In both tasks, slow drift was associated with the size of the pupil and the microsaccade rate, two external indicators of the internal state of the animal. These results show that metrics related to the action of the eyes are associated with a dominant and task-independent mode of neural activity that can be accessed in the population activity of neurons across the cortex.