Neuronal population coding: from vision to decision

神经元群体编码：从视觉到决策

基本信息

批准号：
9523459
负责人：
Marlene Rochelle Cohen
金额：
$ 36.87万
依托单位：
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2013
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2013-08-01 至 2023-07-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9523459
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 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

项目摘要

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.

项目概要大量研究调查了感觉神经元活动之间的关系和行为。隐式或显式指导大部分工作的模型是单个神经元是单位的计算。基本的假设是不同的神经元分组负责每个决策中的感觉、认知或运动前作用。然而，每个神经元的反应都编码一个独特的感觉和认知信号以及噪声的组合，并与其余部分有明显的相互作用网络。这些观察结果，加上从感觉刺激到感官刺激的映射的惊人灵活性行动表明，整个人口活动的不同加权总和可能提供更多信息与不同神经元组相比，关于感觉和行为变量。这个想法代表了一种思考神经编码的新方式。它对于许多行为过程的神经机制，包括感知决策灵长类视觉系统，这是我们的模型系统。这个范式也可以解释长期存在的悖论关于神经代码限制感知任务性能的方面。该提案的目标是确定引导和控制感知的人口活动的各个方面决定。我们假设用于灵活指导和控制决策的感官信息是视觉神经元和运动前神经元群体之间共享。我们方法的两个基石是 1) 同时记录中颞区（MT）的神经元组，编码视觉运动，上丘 (SC) 的反应包括视觉、动眼神经以及介于两者之间的所有反应 2) 使用新的神经元活动测量方法，将整个人群的活动纳入其中。在目标 1 中，我们将比较从主导因素中预测个人知觉决策的程度 MT 或 SC 内群体反应的波动或逐次试验相关的活动两个区域之间。在目标 2 中，我们将确定是否存在与任务无关的刺激信息，这可以导致感觉神经元活动发生巨大变化的物质，会被 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这一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做出决策感受野位于相反的半场。这些研究将共同解决有关感知受限程度的长期存在的问题通过刺激信息在感觉皮层中编码的保真度或通过灵活地编码的信息以任务相关的方式与下游区域进行沟通。更一般地说，这项工作将建立一套用于揭示神经元群体和神经元之间关系的实验和数据分析技术行为。