Optogenetically induced low-frequency correlations impair perception
- The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, United States
- Yale University, United States
- Salk Institute for Biological Studies, United States
Abstract
Deployment of covert attention to a spatial location can cause large decreases in low-frequency correlated variability among neurons in macaque area V4 whose receptive-fields lie at the attended location. It has been estimated that this reduction accounts for a substantial fraction of the attention-mediated improvement in sensory processing. These estimates depend on assumptions about how population signals are decoded and the conclusion that correlated variability impairs perception, is purely hypothetical. Here we test this proposal directly by optogenetically inducing low-frequency fluctuations, to see if this interferes with performance in an attention-demanding task. We find that low-frequency optical stimulation of neurons in V4 elevates correlations among pairs of neurons and impairs the animal's ability to make fine sensory discriminations. Stimulation at higher frequencies does not impair performance, despite comparable modulation of neuronal responses. These results support the hypothesis that attention-dependent reductions in correlated variability contribute to improved perception of attended stimuli.
Data availability
Data for the main figures are available via Dryad (doi:10.5061/dryad.8v0k1j3).
-
Data from: Optogenetically induced low-frequency correlations impair perceptionDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.8v0k1j3.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research
- John H Reynolds
Brain and Behavior Research Foundation
- Anirvan S Nandy
- Jonathan J Nassi
National Institutes of Health (R00EY025026)
- Monika P Jadi
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols of the Salk Institute. All procedures were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the Salk Institute (Protocol #14-00014) and conformed to NIH guidelines.
Copyright
© 2019, Nandy et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,778
- views
-
- 546
- downloads
-
- 28
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Optogenetically induced low-frequency correlations impair perception
eLife 8:e35123.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.35123
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
The relation between neural activity and behaviorally relevant variables is at the heart of neuroscience research. When strong, this relation is termed a neural representation. There is increasing evidence, however, for partial dissociations between activity in an area and relevant external variables. While many explanations have been proposed, a theoretical framework for the relationship between external and internal variables is lacking. Here, we utilize recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to explore the question of when and how neural dynamics and the network’s output are related from a geometrical point of view. We find that training RNNs can lead to two dynamical regimes: dynamics can either be aligned with the directions that generate output variables, or oblique to them. We show that the choice of readout weight magnitude before training can serve as a control knob between the regimes, similar to recent findings in feedforward networks. These regimes are functionally distinct. Oblique networks are more heterogeneous and suppress noise in their output directions. They are furthermore more robust to perturbations along the output directions. Crucially, the oblique regime is specific to recurrent (but not feedforward) networks, arising from dynamical stability considerations. Finally, we show that tendencies toward the aligned or the oblique regime can be dissociated in neural recordings. Altogether, our results open a new perspective for interpreting neural activity by relating network dynamics and their output.
