Cognition: Neurons couple up to make decisions.

Abstract

The use of state-of-the-art techniques to study neuronal activity during a navigational task involving sound stimuli broadens our understanding of how neuronal populations produce complex behaviours. See Letter p.92 Information must be represented at many timescales in the cortex, from precise millisecond tracking of rapidly fluctuating inputs to seconds-long representation of behavioural choice variables. Using calcium imaging data from mice performing a virtual reality auditory decision-making task, Christopher Harvey and colleagues analyse the population codes in the primary auditory and posterior parietal cortex that support choice behaviour. Parietal cortex neurons have stronger activity correlations and carry information over longer timescales than neurons in the auditory cortex, revealing that correlation is a cortical property that enables information coding by populations over different timescales.