Abstract
In systems neuroscience, advances in simultaneous recording technology have helped reveal the population dynamics that underlie the complex neural correlates of animal behavior and cognitive processes. To investigate these correlates, neural interactions are typically abstracted from spike trains of pairs of neurons accumulated over the course of many trials. However, the resultant averaged values do not lead to understanding of neural computation in which the responses of populations are highly variable even under identical external conditions. Accordingly, neural interactions within the population also show strong fluctuations. In the present study, we introduce an analysis method reflecting the temporal variation of neural interactions, in which cross-correlograms on rate estimates are applied via a latent dynamical systems model. Using this method, we were able to predict time-varying neural interactions within a single trial. In addition, the pairwise connections estimated in our analysis increased along behavioral epochs among neurons categorized within similar functional groups. Thus, our analysis method revealed that neurons in the same groups communicate more as the population gets involved in the assigned task. We also showed that the characteristics of neural interaction from our model differ from the results of a typical model employing cross-correlation coefficients. This suggests that our model can extract nonoverlapping information about network topology, unlike the typical model.
Highlights
Information communication via spike trains of neurons in populations is a core computational process that enables many brain areas to execute their roles, which include encoding of stimuli, decision-making, and highlevel cognition [1]
Population activities and CCGs To demonstrate the neural interactions in an anterior lateral motor (ALM) cortex, we analyzed neural data collected from mice as they executed a delayed response task (Fig. 1a, upper panel)
Difference between CCG and ECCG (DCCG), approached zero after a few bins, implying that the DCCG captures the transient effect near time zero by offsetting the shared effects of both the CCG and estimated CCG (ECCG) remaining in the longer time range
Summary
Information communication via spike trains of neurons in populations is a core computational process that enables many brain areas to execute their roles, which include encoding of stimuli, decision-making, and highlevel cognition [1]. To understand these processes, the effects of spike trains across neuronal populations must be determined according to their specific network structures [2,3,4,5,6]. Population activities in diverse brain regions are low dimensional in many instances [19, 30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]; it can be assumed that population activity in single trials can be estimated via a latent dynamical systems model with much lower dimensions than the population size
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