Neuronal population coding: from vision to decision

神经元群体编码：从视觉到决策

• 批准号: 10218182
• 负责人: Marlene Rochelle Cohen
• 金额: $ 36.86万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-08-01 至 2022-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10218182
• 关键词: Address; Affect; Afferent Neurons; Animals; Area; Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; Behavior; Behavioral; Biological Models; Brain; Code; Cognitive; Communication; Data Analyses; Decision Making; Detection; Diagnosis; Dimensions; Discrimination; Disease; Eye Movements; Frequencies; Goals; Grouping; Human; Individual; Location; Macaca mulatta; Measures; Mediating; Mental Depression; Modeling; Motion; Motor; Movement; Neurons; Noise; Perception; Performance; Pharmacotherapy; Population; Positioning Attribute; Primates; Principal Component Analysis; Privatization; Process; Property; Rest; Role; Saccades; Schizophrenia; Sensory; Signal Transduction; Stimulus; Sum; Techniques; Testing; Thinking; Training; Vision; Visual; Visual Cortex; Visual Fields; Visual Motion; Visual system structure; Work; area MT; base; behavioral outcome; experimental analysis; experimental study; flexibility; nervous system disorder; novel; oculomotor; receptive field; relating to nervous system; response; sensory cortex; sensory stimulus; superior colliculus Corpora quadrigemina; visual motor; visual stimulus

Project summary A very large number of studies have investigated the relationship between the activity of sensory neurons and behavior. The model that implicitly or explicitly guides most of that work is that single neurons are the unit of computation. The underlying hypothesis is that different groupings of neurons are responsible for each sensory, cognitive or premotor role in decision-making. However, each neuron's responses encode a unique combination of sensory and cognitive signals as well as noise, and have distinct interactions with the rest of the network. These observations, combined with the staggering flexibility of mappings from sensory stimuli to actions suggest that different weighted sums of the activity of the entire population may be more informative about sensory and behavioral variables than different groupings of neurons. This idea represents a new way of thinking about neural coding. It has important implications for the neuronal mechanisms underlying many behavioral processes, including perceptual decision-making in the primate visual system, which is our model system. This paradigm can also explain longstanding paradoxes about the aspects of the neural code that limit performance on perceptual tasks. The goal of this proposal is to identify the aspects of population activity that guide and gate perceptual decisions. We hypothesize that the sensory information that is used to flexibly guide and gate decisions is shared between populations of visual and premotor neurons. The two cornerstones of our approach are 1) to record simultaneously from groups of neurons in the middle temporal area (MT), which encodes visual motion, and in the superior colliculus (SC), whose responses are visual, oculomotor, and everything in between and 2) to use novel measures of neuronal activity that incorporate the activity of the whole population. In Aim 1, we will compare the extent to which individual perceptual decisions can be predicted from the dominant fluctuations in population responses within MT or the SC or activity that is correlated on a trial by trial basis between the two areas. In Aim 2, we will determine whether task-irrelevant stimulus information, which can cause large changes in the activity of sensory neurons, is filtered out by interactions between MT and the SC. In Aim 3, we will conduct a strong test of the hypothesis that visuo-motor interactions guide perceptual decision-making by measuring the relationship between choices and interactions between MT and SC neurons with receptive fields in opposite hemifields. Together, these studies will address long-standing questions about the extent to which perception is limited by the fidelity with which stimulus information is encoded in sensory cortex or by the information that is flexibly communicated to downstream areas in a task-dependent way. More generally, this work will establish a set of experimental and data analysis techniques for revealing the relationship between neuronal populations and behavior.

项目摘要 大量的研究已经调查了感觉神经元的活动之间的关系 和行为。隐式或显式地指导大部分工作的模型是单个神经元是单位 的计算。其基本假设是，不同的神经元群负责每一个 感觉、认知或运动前区在决策中的作用。然而，每个神经元的反应都编码了一个独特的 感觉和认知信号以及噪音的组合，并与其他部分有明显的相互作用。 网络这些观察结果，加上从感官刺激到 行动表明，整个人口活动的不同加权总和可能更能提供信息 关于感觉和行为变量的信息。 这个想法代表了一种思考神经编码的新方法。这对我们的未来有着重要的意义。 许多行为过程背后的神经机制，包括大脑中的知觉决策， 灵长类动物的视觉系统，这是我们的模型系统。这种范式也可以解释长期存在的悖论 关于限制知觉任务表现的神经代码方面。 这项建议的目标是确定人口活动的各个方面，指导和门感知 决策我们假设，用于灵活引导和门决策的感官信息是 在视觉和前运动神经元之间共享。我们方法的两个基石是：1） 同时记录中颞区（MT）的神经元群，它编码视觉运动， 在上级丘（SC），其反应是视觉，视觉，以及介于两者之间的一切 使用新的方法来测量神经元的活动，并将整个群体的活动结合起来。目标1： 将比较个人知觉决策可以从主导因素预测的程度 MT或SC内群体缓解的波动或在试验基础上相关的活动 在这两个地区之间。在目标2中，我们将确定是否与任务无关的刺激信息， 引起感觉神经元活动的巨大变化，被MT和SC之间的相互作用过滤掉。 在目标3中，我们将对视觉-运动相互作用引导知觉的假设进行强有力的检验。 通过测量MT和SC神经元之间的选择和相互作用之间的关系来进行决策 感受野在相反的半野 总之，这些研究将解决长期存在的问题，即感知受到限制的程度 通过刺激信息在感觉皮层中编码的保真度，或者通过灵活地 以任务依赖的方式传达给下游区域。更一般地说，这项工作将建立一套 实验和数据分析技术揭示神经元群体之间的关系， 行为