Abstract
SummaryHow sensory evidence is transformed across multiple brain regions to influence behavior remains poorly understood. We trained mice in a visual change detection task designed to separate the covert antecedents of choices from activity associated with their execution. Wide-field calcium imaging across the dorsal cortex revealed fundamentally different dynamics of activity underlying these processes. Although signals related to execution of choice were widespread, fluctuations in sensory evidence in the absence of overt motor responses triggered a confined activity cascade, beginning with transient modulation of visual cortex and followed by sustained recruitment of the secondary and primary motor cortex. Activation of the motor cortex by sensory evidence was modulated by animals’ expectation of when the stimulus was likely to change. These results reveal distinct activation timescales of specific cortical areas by sensory evidence during decision-making and show that recruitment of the motor cortex depends on the interaction of sensory evidence and temporal expectation.
Highlights
As animals form judgments about the sensory scene, information represented in sensory cortical areas influences motor actions by engaging a distributed network of sensorimotor pathways
Using wide-field calcium imaging of the dorsal neocortex, we identified a cascade of activity induced by fluctuations in stimulus speed
The temporal frequency (TF) of the grating stimulus varied around the mean every 50 ms during the baseline and the change periods on 70% of trials
Summary
As animals form judgments about the sensory scene, information represented in sensory cortical areas influences motor actions by engaging a distributed network of sensorimotor pathways. Perceptual decisions involve interaction of sensory information with subjects’ expectations and prior knowledge leading up to behavioral choice (Gold and Shadlen, 2007; Summerfield and de Lange, 2014). Behavioral choice influences representation of sensory stimuli (Nienborg and Cumming, 2009), whereas neural correlates of task-related and spontaneous overt behaviors dominate global brain activity (Allen et al, 2017; Musall et al, 2019; Stringer et al, 2019). Primate studies have set the gold standard in experimental design probing decision-making (Gold and Shadlen, 2007), the tools available with mice offer an opportunity to look at the distributed nature of decision-related processes. Mice can be trained in a range of perceptual tasks involving discriminating or detecting changes in visual stimuli (Harvey et al, 2012; Glickfeld et al, 2013; Poort et al, 2015; Burgess et al, 2017) and accumulating visual sensory evidence (Odoemene et al, 2018; Pinto et al, 2019)
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