TY - JOUR
T1 - How Can Single Sensory Neurons Predict Behavior?
AU - Pitkow, Xaq
AU - Liu, Sheng
AU - Angelaki, Dora E.
AU - DeAngelis, Gregory C.
AU - Pouget, Alexandre
N1 - Funding Information:
Thanks to Aihua Chen and Yong Gu for providing access to their neural recordings, and to Kaushik Lakshminarasimhan for helpful conversations. This work was supported by NIH grant T32DC009974 and a McNair Foundation grant to X.P., by NIH grant EY016178 to G.C.D., by NIH grants EY017866 and DC004260 to D.E.A., and by a James McDonnell Foundation grant and SNF grant 31003A-143707 to A.P.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2015/7/15
Y1 - 2015/7/15
N2 - Single sensory neurons can be surprisingly predictive of behavior in discrimination tasks. We propose this ispossible because sensory information extracted from neural populations is severely restricted, either by near-optimal decoding of a population with information-limiting correlations or by suboptimal decoding that is blind to correlations. These have different consequences for choice correlations, the correlations between neural responses and behavioral choices. In the vestibular and cerebellar nuclei and the dorsal medial superior temporal area, we found that choice correlations during heading discrimination are consistent with near-optimal decoding ofneuronal responses corrupted by information-limiting correlations. In the ventral intraparietal area, the choice correlations are also consistent with the presence of information-limiting correlations, but this area does not appear to influence behavior, although the choice correlations are particularly large. These findings demonstrate how choice correlations can be used to assess the efficiency of the downstream readout and detect the presence of information-limiting correlations. The activity of just one sensory neuron in the brain often accurately predicts what an animal will perceive in simple tests. Pitkow etal. provide a new theory of why this happens, and offer experimental data that support their theory.
AB - Single sensory neurons can be surprisingly predictive of behavior in discrimination tasks. We propose this ispossible because sensory information extracted from neural populations is severely restricted, either by near-optimal decoding of a population with information-limiting correlations or by suboptimal decoding that is blind to correlations. These have different consequences for choice correlations, the correlations between neural responses and behavioral choices. In the vestibular and cerebellar nuclei and the dorsal medial superior temporal area, we found that choice correlations during heading discrimination are consistent with near-optimal decoding ofneuronal responses corrupted by information-limiting correlations. In the ventral intraparietal area, the choice correlations are also consistent with the presence of information-limiting correlations, but this area does not appear to influence behavior, although the choice correlations are particularly large. These findings demonstrate how choice correlations can be used to assess the efficiency of the downstream readout and detect the presence of information-limiting correlations. The activity of just one sensory neuron in the brain often accurately predicts what an animal will perceive in simple tests. Pitkow etal. provide a new theory of why this happens, and offer experimental data that support their theory.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84929436710&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84929436710&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.06.033
DO - 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.06.033
M3 - Article
C2 - 26182422
AN - SCOPUS:84929436710
SN - 0896-6273
VL - 87
SP - 411
EP - 423
JO - Neuron
JF - Neuron
IS - 2
ER -