Decoding Pigeon Behavior Outcomes during Goal-directed Decision Task by WSR Functional Network Analysis.

Abstract

It is a hot research direction to reveal the working mechanism of brain by measuring the connection characteristics of brain function network. In this paper, to decode pigeon behavior outcomes in goal-directed decision task, an experiment based on plus maze was designed and the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) of the pigeon was selected as the target brain region. The local field potential (LFP) signals in the waiting area (WA) and turning area (TA) were recorded when the pigeons performed the goal-directed tasks. Then, the brain functional connection networks of the LFPs were constructed and the extracted features were applied to decode pigeon behavior outcomes. Firstly, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) was used to carried out time-frequency analysis and the task-related frequency band (40-60 Hz) was extracted. Then, weighted sparse representation (WSR) method was used to construct the functional connectivity network and the related network features were selected. Finally, k-nearest neighbor (kNN) algorithm was used to decode behavior outcomes. The results show that the energy difference between TA and WA in 40-60 Hz band is significantly higher than those in other bands. The selected features have good discriminability for the representation of the differences between WA and TA. The decoding results also suggest the classification performance of the different behavior outcomes. These results show the effectiveness of the WSR to construct the function network to decode behavior outcomes.