Abstract
The immature brain is highly spontaneously active. Over development this activity must be integrated with emerging patterns of stimulus-evoked activity, but little is known about how this occurs. Here we investigated this question by recording spontaneous and evoked neural activity in the larval zebrafish tectum from 4 to 15 days post-fertilisation. Correlations within spontaneous and evoked activity epochs were comparable over development, and their neural assemblies refined in similar ways. However, both the similarity between evoked and spontaneous assemblies, and also the geometric distance between spontaneous and evoked patterns, decreased over development. At all stages of development, evoked activity was of higher dimension than spontaneous activity. Thus, spontaneous and evoked activity do not converge over development in this system, and these results do not support the hypothesis that spontaneous activity evolves to form a Bayesian prior for evoked activity.
Highlights
As newborn neurons mature they start to become spontaneously active (Galli and Maffei, 1988)
We recorded 30 min of spontaneous activity in the dark followed by 61.6 min of evoked activity
Both evoked and spontaneous neural activity are characterised by time points of synchronised activity across a population of neurons (Yuste, 2015; Romano et al, 2015)
Summary
As newborn neurons mature they start to become spontaneously active (Galli and Maffei, 1988). One key functional role played by coordinated spontaneous activity in neural development is to assist with the formation of appropriate brain wiring (Leighton and Lohmann, 2016; Ackman and Crair, 2014) Evidence for this includes findings from multiple systems that disrupting the structure of spontaneous activity disrupts circuit development (Kirkby et al, 2013; Arroyo and Feller, 2016; Xu et al, 2011). A specific mathematical formulation is that spontaneous activity could form a Bayesian prior for stimulusevoked activity (Fiser et al, 2010) If this is the case, patterns of spontaneous activity during development should gradually refine to become more similar to stimulus-evoked patterns. We show that, despite having some similarities, spontaneous and evoked patterns diverge over development
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