Dynamic causal communication channels between neocortical areas

Javadzadeh, Mitra; Hofer, Sonja B.

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2022.05.011

Cited by 26 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 92 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Our major contribution is to propose a single-neuron mechanism (i.e. gain modulation) for flexible selection of different subspaces through population neural dynamics (Javadzadeh and Hofer 2022; Panichello and Buschman 2021; Yoo and Hayden 2020), despite fixed connectivity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible selection of task-relevant features through population gating

Barbosa

Proville

Rodgers

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Brains can gracefully weed out irrelevant stimuli to guide behavior. This feat is believed to rely on a progressive selection of task-relevant stimuli across the cortical hierarchy, but the specific across-area interactions enabling stimulus selection are still unclear. Here, we propose that population gating, occurring within A1 but controlled by top-down inputs from mPFC, can support across-area stimulus selection. Examining single-unit activity recorded while rats performed an auditory context-dependent task, we found that A1 encoded relevant and irrelevant stimuli along a common dimension of its neural space. Yet, the relevant stimulus encoding was enhanced along an extra dimension. In turn, mPFC encoded only the stimulus relevant to the ongoing context. To identify candidate mechanisms for stimulus selection within A1, we reverse-engineered low-rank RNNs trained on a similar task. Our analyses predicted that two context-modulated neural populations gated their preferred stimulus in opposite contexts, which we confirmed in further analyses of A1. We finally integrated our within-area observations in a two-region RNN and proposed a novel mechanism for flexible across-area communication through fixed connectivity.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexible selection of task-relevant features through population gating

Barbosa

Proville

Rodgers

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An interventional approach e.g. 23 could further interrogate the role feedback in S1-S2 circuit, to elucidate whether perception arises through a bi-directional flow of information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This requires reliable propagation of neural signals from sensory organs through anatomical hierarchies in the brain. Signal propagation is usually studied in psychophysical assays where stimuli of increasing strength are presented to the participant, and their detection signalled behaviourally, while the activity of relevant brain regions is recorded to capture propagating activity [17][18][19][20][21][22][23] .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception and propagation of activity through the cortical hierarchy is determined by neural variability

Rowland

Plas

Loidolt

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The brains of higher organisms are composed of anatomically and functionally distinct regions performing specialised tasks; but regions do not operate in isolation. Orchestration of complex behaviours requires communication between brain regions, but how neural activity dynamics are organised to facilitate reliable transmission is not well understood. We studied this process directly by generating neural activity that propagates between brain regions and drives behaviour, allowing us to assess how populations of neurons in sensory cortex cooperate to transmit information. We achieved this by imaging two hierarchically organised and densely interconnected regions, the primary and secondary somatosensory cortex (S1 and S2) in mice while performing two-photon photostimulation of S1 neurons and assigning behavioural salience to the photostimulation. We found that the probability of perception is determined not only by the strength of the photostimulation signal, but also by the variability of S1 neural activity. Therefore, maximising the signal-to-noise ratio of the stimulus representation in cortex is critical to its continued propagation downstream. Further, we show that propagated, behaviourally salient activity elicits balanced, persistent, and generalised activation of the downstream region. Hence, our work adds to existing understanding of cortical function by identifying how population activity is formatted to ensure robust transmission of information, allowing specialised brain regions to communicate and coordinate behaviour.

show abstract

“…Second, the inter-areal long-range connection matrix is given by the anterograde tracing data (Oh et al 2014; Knox et al 2018; Wang et al 2020). Third, targeting is biased onto inhibitory cells for top-down compared with bottom-up projections, therefore feedforward connections have a greater net excitatory effect than feedback connections (counterstream inhibitory bias, CIB) (Mejias and Wang 2022; Javadzadeh and Hofer 2022; Wang 2022).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting distributed working memory activity in a large-scale mouse brain: the importance of the cell type-specific connectome

Ding

Jaramillo

Jiang

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent advances in connectomic and neurophysiological tools make it possible to probe whole-brain mechanisms in the mouse that underlie cognition and behavior. Based on experimental data, we developed a large-scale model of the mouse brain for a cardinal cognitive function called working memory, the brain's ability to internally hold and process information without sensory input. In the model, interregional connectivity is constrained by mesoscopic connectome data. The density of parvalbumin-expressing interneurons in the model varies systematically across the cortex. We found that the long-range cell type-specific targeting and density of cell classes define working memory representations. A core cortical subnetwork and the thalamus produce distributed persistent activity, and the network exhibits numerous attractor states. Novel cell type-specific graph theory measures predicted the activity patterns and core subnetwork. This work highlights the need for cell type-specific connectomics, and provides a theory and tools to interpret large-scale recordings of brain activity during cognition.

show abstract

Dynamic causal communication channels between neocortical areas

Cited by 26 publications

References 92 publications

Flexible selection of task-relevant features through population gating

Flexible selection of task-relevant features through population gating

Perception and propagation of activity through the cortical hierarchy is determined by neural variability

Predicting distributed working memory activity in a large-scale mouse brain: the importance of the cell type-specific connectome

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About