Psychophysically measured task strategy for disparity discrimination is reflected in V2 neurons

Nienborg, Hendrikje; Cumming, Bruce G.

doi:10.1038/nn1991

Cited by 54 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…According to a bottom-up explanation of choice-related activity, CPs may appear at stages of processing where sensory signals are represented in a format appropriate to drive behavior. In contrast, if CPs are primarily driven by top-down signals, as suggested by recent studies (11,48,54,55,61,62), they could appear at any stage of processing that receives decision-related feedback. In the vestibular system, targets of feedback could potentially include the primary afferents through their efferent innervation (63).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Neuronal thresholds and choice-related activity of otolith afferent fibers during heading perception

Dickman

DeAngelis

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How activity of sensory neurons leads to perceptual decisions remains a challenge to understand. Correlations between choices and single neuron firing rates have been found early in vestibular processing, in the brainstem and cerebellum. To investigate the origins of choice-related activity, we have recorded from otolith afferent fibers while animals performed a fine heading discrimination task. We find that afferent fibers have similar discrimination thresholds as central cells, and the most sensitive fibers have thresholds that are only twofold or threefold greater than perceptual thresholds. Unlike brainstem and cerebellar nuclei neurons, spike counts from afferent fibers do not exhibit trial-by-trial correlations with perceptual decisions. This finding may reflect the fact that otolith afferent responses are poorly suited for driving heading perception because they fail to discriminate self-motion from changes in orientation relative to gravity. Alternatively, if choice probabilities reflect top-down inference signals, they are not relayed to the vestibular periphery.neuronal threshold | choice probability | psychophysical threshold | otolith afferent | heading discrimination T he neural basis of perception holds a long-standing fascination for neuroscientists. How do the properties of single neurons and populations of neurons relate to, and account for, sensory perception? In all sensory systems, information about the world is first translated into neural activity by peripheral receptor neurons, and then transformed by multiple stages of subcortical and cortical processing into a perceptual decision. How and where does perception emerge from multiple neural representations that appear to be at least partially redundant? These questions have been addressed often in sensory and multisensory cortex (e.g., in refs. 1-3 for vestibular perception), but much less is known about how the activity of sensory afferents relates to perceptual sensitivity and perceptual decisions.One way to assess a potential role of sensory neurons in a perceptual task is to compare neuronal and perceptual sensitivity, measured simultaneously in the same subject (4). Although this comparison has been done many times for cortical neurons (1, 5-7), little is known about how the sensitivity of peripheral afferents compares with behavior apart from microneurography studies of tactile afferents in humans (8, 9). To our knowledge, the present study provides the first direct comparison of afferent neuronal sensitivity and perceptual sensitivity, measured simultaneously in experimental animals. Results of such comparisons have important implications for understanding how population encoding and decoding may constrain and shape the information that guides behavior.Another way that neuroscientists have explored the functional links between sensory neurons and perception is by measuring the trial-by-trial correlations between neural activity and perceptual decisions, which are typically quantified as "choice probabilities" (CPs) (10). The "bottom-...

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Neuronal thresholds and choice-related activity of otolith afferent fibers during heading perception

Dickman

DeAngelis

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These correlations are frequently referred to as 'choice-probabilities' and occur in many perceptual tasks and in many visual areas [47][48][49][50][51][52]. Figure 1d shows recent results of a study reporting choice probabilities in V1 for an orientation discrimination task [53 ].…”

Section: Task-dependent Modulation Of Correlations Between Neuronsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Belief states as a framework to explain extra-retinal influences in visual cortex

Nienborg

Roelfsema

2015

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The activity of sensory neurons is modulated by non-sensory influences, but the role of these influences in cognition is only partially understood. Here we review how the large-scale recording of neuronal activity within and across brain regions allows researchers to examine the interactions between simultaneously recorded neurons as they are jointly influenced by fluctuations in an animal's mental state. We focus on studies on the visual cortex of non-human primates to examine the relationship between extra-retinal influences and beliefs about the state of the sensory world. We explore how these influences can be understood within theoretical frameworks that propose how the continuous updating of belief states supports perceptual inference.

show abstract

“…This causal model accounted for why neural-behavioral covariations were both weak and proportional to the sensitivity of individual neurons (Celebrini and Newsome, 1994;Britten et al, 1996). A complicating factor in this causal interpretation is that fluctuations in neural activity may arise from different sources and at different times relative to the perceptual decision Uka and DeAngelis, 2004;Nienborg and Cumming, 2007;Gu et al, 2008;Law and Gold, 2008;Sasaki and Uka, 2009). For example, neural-behavioral covariations may depend on the strength of interneuron correlations Cohen and Newsome, 2009;Law and Gold, 2009;Nienborg and Cumming, 2010), which can change with task or attentional demands (Cohen and Newsome, 2008;Cohen and Maunsell, 2009;Law and Gold, 2009;Mitchell et al, 2009;Churchland et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Functional Link between Area MT Neural Fluctuations and Detection of a Brief Motion Stimulus

Smith

Zhan²,

Cook³

2011

J. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Fluctuations of neural firing rates in visual cortex are known to be correlated with variations in perceptual performance. It is important to know whether these fluctuations are functionally linked to perception in a causal manner or instead reflect non-causal processes that arise after the perceptual decision is made. We recorded from middle temporal (MT) neurons from monkey subjects while they detected the random occurrence of a brief 50 ms motion pulse that occurred in either of two (or simultaneously in both) random dot patches located in the same hemisphere. The receptive field parameters of the motion pulse were matched to that preferred by each MT neuron under study. This task contained uncertainty in both space and time because, on any given trial, the subjects did not know which patch would contain the motion pulse or when the motion pulse would occur. Covariations between MT activity and behavior began just before the motion pulse onset and peaked at the maximum neural response. These neural-behavioral covariations were strongest when only one patch contained the motion pulse and were still weakly present when a patch did not contain a motion pulse. A feedforward temporal integration model with two independent detector channels captured both the detection performance and evolution of the neuralbehavior covariations over time and stimulus condition. The results suggest that, when detecting a brief visual stimulus, there is a causal relationship between fluctuations in neural activity and variations in behavior across trials.

show abstract

Psychophysically measured task strategy for disparity discrimination is reflected in V2 neurons

Cited by 54 publications

References 36 publications

Neuronal thresholds and choice-related activity of otolith afferent fibers during heading perception

Neuronal thresholds and choice-related activity of otolith afferent fibers during heading perception

Belief states as a framework to explain extra-retinal influences in visual cortex

The Functional Link between Area MT Neural Fluctuations and Detection of a Brief Motion Stimulus

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About