Stimulus-dependent relationships between behavioral choice and sensory neural responses.

Daniel Chicharro,Stefano Panzeri,Ralf M Haefner

doi:10.7554/elife.54858

Abstract

Understanding perceptual decision-making requires linking sensory neural responses to behavioral choices. In two-choice tasks, activity-choice covariations are commonly quantified with a single measure of choice probability (CP), without characterizing their changes across stimulus levels. We provide theoretical conditions for stimulus dependencies of activity-choice covariations. Assuming a general decision-threshold model, which comprises both feedforward and feedback processing and allows for a stimulus-modulated neural population covariance, we analytically predict a very general and previously unreported stimulus dependence of CPs. We develop new tools, including refined analyses of CPs and generalized linear models with stimulus-choice interactions, which accurately assess the stimulus- or choice-driven signals of each neuron, characterizing stimulus-dependent patterns of choice-related signals. With these tools, we analyze CPs of macaque MT neurons during a motion discrimination task. Our analysis provides preliminary empirical evidence for the promise of studying stimulus dependencies of choice-related signals, encouraging further assessment in wider data sets.

Highlights

How perceptual decisions depend on responses of sensory neurons is a fundamental question in systems neuroscience (Parker and Newsome, 1998; Gold and Shadlen, 2001; Romo and Salinas, 2003; Gold and Shadlen, 2007; Siegel et al, 2015; van Vugt et al, 2018; O’Connell et al, 2018; Steinmetz et al, 2019)
The predominance of a symmetric and asymmetric pattern would only re ect which are the predominant choice probability (CP)(pCR ) shapes shared across cells
This clustering analysis con rms the presence of shared patterns of CP stimulus-dependence across cells, whose shape is compatible with the analytical predictions from the threshold- and gain-related dependencies

Summary

Introduction

How perceptual decisions depend on responses of sensory neurons is a fundamental question in systems neuroscience (Parker and Newsome, 1998; Gold and Shadlen, 2001; Romo and Salinas, 2003; Gold and Shadlen, 2007; Siegel et al, 2015; van Vugt et al, 2018; O’Connell et al, 2018; Steinmetz et al, 2019). The seminal work of Britten et al (1996) showed that responses from single cells in area MT of monkeys during a motion discrimination task covaried with behavioral choices. It has become common to report for each neuron a single CP value to quantify the strength of activity-choice covariations. This scalar CP value has been typically calculated either only from trials with a single, non-informative stimulus level This scalar CP value has been typically calculated either only from trials with a single, non-informative stimulus level (e.g. Dodd et al, 2001; Parker et al, 2002; Krug et al, 2004; Wimmer et al, 2015; Katz et al, 2016; Wasmuht et al, 2019), or by pooling trials across stimulus levels (so-called grand CP (Britten et al, 1996)) under the assumption that choice-related neural signals are separable from stimulus-driven responses

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