Neural Activity Predicts Reaction in Primates Long Before a Behavioral Response.

Mohsen Parto Dezfouli,Stefan Treue,Mohammad Bagher Khamechian,Moein Esghaei,Mohammad Reza Daliri

doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00207

Abstract

How neural activity is linked to behavior is a critical question in neural engineering and cognitive neurosciences. It is crucial to predict behavior as early as possible, to plan a machine response in real-time brain computer interactions. However, previous studies have studied the neural readout of behavior only within a short time before the action is performed. This leaves unclear, if the neural activity long before a decision could predict the upcoming behavior. By recording extracellular neural activities from the visual cortex of behaving rhesus monkeys, we show that: (1) both, local field potentials (LFPs) and the rate of neural spikes long before (>2 s) a monkey responds to a change, foretell its behavioral performance in a spatially selective manner; (2) LFPs, the more accessible component of extracellular activity, are a stronger predictor of behavior; and (3) LFP amplitude is positively correlated while spiking activity is negatively correlated with behavioral reaction time (RT). These results suggest that field potentials could be used to predict behavior way before it is performed, an observation that could potentially be useful for brain computer interface applications, and that they contribute to the sensory neural circuit’s speed in information processing.

Highlights

How neural activities control the behavior is a crucial question in neuroscience
We considered the trials in which the stimulus change occurred 1,000–2,500 ms following the stimulus onset as ‘‘early change,’’ and trials with their target change occurring 2,500–3,500 ms after stimulus onset as ‘‘late change.’’ Figures 4A,B show the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve across time for discrimination of neural activity between fast and slow reaction time (RT) trials in the early-change and late-change trial categories
We reported here that visually evoked local field potentials (LFPs) and multi-unit activities (MUA) in macaque MT are predictive of how fast primates report a visual change

Summary

Introduction

How neural activities control the behavior (either choice or performance) is a crucial question in neuroscience. It has been reported that behavioral choice is closely connected to the neural activity (Johansson and Vallbo, 1979; Newsome et al, 1989; Bushnell et al, 1993; Britten et al, 1996; Romo et al, 1996; Shadlen et al, 1996; Horwitz and Newsome, 2001; Cook and Maunsell, 2002; Barberini et al, 2005; Liu and Newsome, 2005, 2006). Cohen and Newsome (2009) suggested, that to understand the neural mechanisms underlying a behavioral choice, one needs to consider the dynamics of the neural population activity in time. Liu and Newsome (2005) showed that the behavioral choices are correlated with the neural activity pooled across populations of neurons

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Conclusion