Sequential method for fast neural population activity reconstruction in the cortex from incomplete noisy measurements

Author(s):  
M.V. Kulikova ◽  
P.M. Lima ◽  
G. Yu. Kulikov
eLife ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Ponce-Alvarez ◽  
Gabriela Mochol ◽  
Ainhoa Hermoso-Mendizabal ◽  
Jaime de la Rocha ◽  
Gustavo Deco

Previous research showed that spontaneous neuronal activity presents sloppiness: the collective behavior is strongly determined by a small number of parameter combinations, defined as ‘stiff’ dimensions, while it is insensitive to many others (‘sloppy’ dimensions). Here, we analyzed neural population activity from the auditory cortex of anesthetized rats while the brain spontaneously transited through different synchronized and desynchronized states and intermittently received sensory inputs. We showed that cortical state transitions were determined by changes in stiff parameters associated with the activity of a core of neurons with low responses to stimuli and high centrality within the observed network. In contrast, stimulus-evoked responses evolved along sloppy dimensions associated with the activity of neurons with low centrality and displaying large ongoing and stimulus-evoked fluctuations without affecting the integrity of the network. Our results shed light on the interplay among stability, flexibility, and responsiveness of neuronal collective dynamics during intrinsic and induced activity.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián Ponce-Alvarez ◽  
Gabriela Mochol ◽  
Ainhoa Hermoso-Mendizabal ◽  
Jaime de la Rocha ◽  
Gustavo Deco

SummaryPrevious research showed that spontaneous neuronal activity presents sloppiness: the collective behavior is strongly determined by a small number of parameter combinations, defined as “stiff” dimensions, while it is insensitive to many others (“sloppy” dimensions). Here, we analyzed neural population activity from the auditory cortex of anesthetized rats while the brain spontaneously transited through different synchronized and desynchronized states and intermittently received sensory inputs. We showed that cortical state transitions were determined by changes in stiff parameters associated with the activity of a core of neurons with low responses to stimuli and high centrality within the observed network. In contrast, stimulus-evoked responses evolved along sloppy dimensions associated with the activity of neurons with low centrality and displaying large ongoing and stimulus-evoked fluctuations without affecting the integrity of the network. Our results shed light on the interplay among stability, flexibility, and responsiveness of neuronal collective dynamics during intrinsic and induced activity.


eLife ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D Golub ◽  
Byron M Yu ◽  
Steven M Chase

To successfully guide limb movements, the brain takes in sensory information about the limb, internally tracks the state of the limb, and produces appropriate motor commands. It is widely believed that this process uses an internal model, which describes our prior beliefs about how the limb responds to motor commands. Here, we leveraged a brain-machine interface (BMI) paradigm in rhesus monkeys and novel statistical analyses of neural population activity to gain insight into moment-by-moment internal model computations. We discovered that a mismatch between subjects’ internal models and the actual BMI explains roughly 65% of movement errors, as well as long-standing deficiencies in BMI speed control. We then used the internal models to characterize how the neural population activity changes during BMI learning. More broadly, this work provides an approach for interpreting neural population activity in the context of how prior beliefs guide the transformation of sensory input to motor output.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cian O’Donnell ◽  
J. Tiago Gonçalves ◽  
Nick Whiteley ◽  
Carlos Portera-Cailliau ◽  
Terrence J. Sejnowski

Our understanding of neural population coding has been limited by a lack of analysis methods to characterize spiking data from large populations. The biggest challenge comes from the fact that the number of possible network activity patterns scales exponentially with the number of neurons recorded ([Formula: see text]). Here we introduce a new statistical method for characterizing neural population activity that requires semi-independent fitting of only as many parameters as the square of the number of neurons, requiring drastically smaller data sets and minimal computation time. The model works by matching the population rate (the number of neurons synchronously active) and the probability that each individual neuron fires given the population rate. We found that this model can accurately fit synthetic data from up to 1000 neurons. We also found that the model could rapidly decode visual stimuli from neural population data from macaque primary visual cortex about 65 ms after stimulus onset. Finally, we used the model to estimate the entropy of neural population activity in developing mouse somatosensory cortex and, surprisingly, found that it first increases, and then decreases during development. This statistical model opens new options for interrogating neural population data and can bolster the use of modern large-scale in vivo Ca[Formula: see text] and voltage imaging tools.


2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (30) ◽  
pp. 15210-15215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily R. Oby ◽  
Matthew D. Golub ◽  
Jay A. Hennig ◽  
Alan D. Degenhart ◽  
Elizabeth C. Tyler-Kabara ◽  
...  

Learning has been associated with changes in the brain at every level of organization. However, it remains difficult to establish a causal link between specific changes in the brain and new behavioral abilities. We establish that new neural activity patterns emerge with learning. We demonstrate that these new neural activity patterns cause the new behavior. Thus, the formation of new patterns of neural population activity can underlie the learning of new skills.


2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 614-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byron M. Yu ◽  
John P. Cunningham ◽  
Gopal Santhanam ◽  
Stephen I. Ryu ◽  
Krishna V. Shenoy ◽  
...  

We consider the problem of extracting smooth, low-dimensional neural trajectories that summarize the activity recorded simultaneously from many neurons on individual experimental trials. Beyond the benefit of visualizing the high-dimensional, noisy spiking activity in a compact form, such trajectories can offer insight into the dynamics of the neural circuitry underlying the recorded activity. Current methods for extracting neural trajectories involve a two-stage process: the spike trains are first smoothed over time, then a static dimensionality-reduction technique is applied. We first describe extensions of the two-stage methods that allow the degree of smoothing to be chosen in a principled way and that account for spiking variability, which may vary both across neurons and across time. We then present a novel method for extracting neural trajectories—Gaussian-process factor analysis (GPFA)—which unifies the smoothing and dimensionality-reduction operations in a common probabilistic framework. We applied these methods to the activity of 61 neurons recorded simultaneously in macaque premotor and motor cortices during reach planning and execution. By adopting a goodness-of-fit metric that measures how well the activity of each neuron can be predicted by all other recorded neurons, we found that the proposed extensions improved the predictive ability of the two-stage methods. The predictive ability was further improved by going to GPFA. From the extracted trajectories, we directly observed a convergence in neural state during motor planning, an effect that was shown indirectly by previous studies. We then show how such methods can be a powerful tool for relating the spiking activity across a neural population to the subject's behavior on a single-trial basis. Finally, to assess how well the proposed methods characterize neural population activity when the underlying time course is known, we performed simulations that revealed that GPFA performed tens of percent better than the best two-stage method.


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