Multiplicative and Additive Modulation of Neuronal Tuning with Population Activity Affects Encoded Information

Abstract

Numerous studies have shown that neuronal responses are modulated by stimulus properties, and also by the state of the local network. However, little is known about how activity fluctuations of neuronal populations modulate the sensory tuning of cells and affect their encoded information. We found that fluctuations in ongoing and stimulus-evoked population activity in primate visual cortex modulate the tuning of neurons in a multiplicative and additive manner. While distributed on a continuum, neurons with stronger multiplicative effects tended to have less additive modulation, and vice versa. The information encoded by multiplicatively-modulated neurons increased with greater population activity, while that of additively-modulated neurons decreased. These effects offset each other, so that population activity had little effect on total information. Our results thus suggest that intrinsic activity fluctuations may act as a `traffic light' that determines which subset of neurons are most informative.

Lateral orbitofrontal cortex anticipates choices and integrates prior with current information

“…We confirmed that this result holds using a much more stringent test that does not assume that both variables are encoded linearly, as we did before. To do so, we used decoding techniques that predict one quantity at a time from the population activity of a simultaneously recorded neuronal ensemble35, while keeping the other quantity constant (Fig. 6; Methods).…”

Segregation of Visual Response Properties in the Mouse Superior Colliculus and Their Modulation during Locomotion

“…To model the effect of modulation, we took an approach that has been used to describe how population activity modulates macaque V1 neurons (Arandia-Romero et al, 2016). This model estimates the additive and multiplicative components of the modulation.…”

Models of Neuronal Stimulus-Response Functions: Elaboration, Estimation, and Evaluation

“…For example, transitions between synchronized and desynchronized firing states in cortex are correlated with changes in linear RFs (Wörgötter et al, 1998) and in higher-order stimulus-response properties (Pachitariu et al, 2015). Overall levels of population activity, perhaps associated with similar state transitions, also correlate with multiplicative or additive modulation of tuning curves (Arandia-Romero et al, 2016). Many such population-state changes may be reflected in aggegrate signals such as the local field potential (LFP) (Saleem et al, 2010), and indeed a GLM with a fixed stimulus filter that also incorporated LFP phase information could provide an improved description of neural responses in the anaesthetized auditory cortex (Kayser et al, 2015).…”