Contribution of non-sensory neurons in visual cortical areas to visually guided decisions in the rat

Yuma Osako,Tomoya Ohnuki,Yuta Tanisumi,Kazuki Shiotani,Hiroyuki Manabe,Yoshio Sakurai,Junya Hirokawa

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.03.099

Yuma Osako, Tomoya Ohnuki + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.03.099

Copy DOI

Abstract

It is widely assumed that trial-by-trial variability in visual detection performance is explained by the fidelity of visual responses in visual cortical areas influenced by fluctuations of internal states, such as vigilance and behavioral history. However, it is not clear which neuronal ensembles represent such different internal states. Here, we utilized a visual detection task, which distinguishes internal states in response to identical stimuli, while recording neurons simultaneously from the primary visual cortex (V1) and the posterior parietal cortex (PPC). We found that rats sometimes withheld their responses to visual stimuli despite the robust presence of visual responses in V1. Our unsupervised analysis revealed distinct population dynamics segregating hit responses from misses, orthogonally embedded to visual response dynamics in both V1 and PPC. Heterogeneous non-sensory neurons in V1 and PPC significantly contributed to population-level encoding accompanied with the modulation of noise correlation only in V1. These results highlight the non-trivial contributions of non-sensory neurons in V1 and PPC for population-level computations that reflect the animals' internal states to drive behavioral responses to visual stimuli.

Highlights

Identical sensory stimuli sometimes evoke different perceptual and behavioral responses
Significant contributions of non-sensory neurons in V1 and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) for separating different choice types as population activity So far, we found no significant differences in neural activities in the Hit+ and Miss+ trials
We found a significant separation between choice types in the analysis window in both V1 and PPC (Figures 3D and S4C), suggesting that separation of the Hit+ and Miss+ responses is the result of the coordinated activity of many neurons

Summary

Introduction

Identical sensory stimuli sometimes evoke different perceptual and behavioral responses. Trial-by-trial variance of responses to identical stimuli is believed to reflect noise in the conversion of sensory information into motor outputs.[5] It has been demonstrated that the variability of the firing rates of sensory neurons is responsible for the variable response to different choices.[6,7] accumulating evidence suggests that perceptual decisions are significantly affected by latent subjective states reflecting task engagement.[8] For instance, behavioral response variability is correlated with mind wandering in humans[9] and fluctuations of physiological and behavioral states in animals.[10,11,12,13] These subjective state drifts could be partially attributed to cortical activity fluctuation.[13,14,15] The synchronization and desynchronization of many neurons in particular areas of the cortex could affect the efficiency of population coding.[16,17]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion