neuronal encoding
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2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kadjita Asumbisa ◽  
Adrien Peyrache ◽  
Stuart Trenholm

Vision plays a crucial role in instructing the brain's spatial navigation systems. However, little is known about how vision loss affects the neuronal encoding of spatial information. Here, recording from head direction (HD) cells in the anterior dorsal nucleus of the thalamus in mice, we find stable and robust HD tuning in blind animals. In contrast, placing sighted animals in darkness significantly impairs HD cell tuning. We find that blind mice use olfactory cues to maintain stable HD tuning and that prior visual experience leads to refined HD cell tuning in blind adult mice compared to congenitally blind animals. Finally, in the absence of both visual and olfactory cues, the HD attractor network remains intact but the preferred firing direction of HD cells continuously drifts over time. We thus demonstrate remarkable flexibility in how the brain uses diverse sensory information to generate a stable directional representation of space.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariia Kaliuzhna ◽  
Matthias Kirschner ◽  
Philippe N Tobler ◽  
Stefan Kaiser

Background: Deficits in neural processing of reward have been described in both bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia (SZ), but it remains unclear to what extent these deficits are caused by similar mechanisms. Efficient reward processing relies on adaptive coding which allows representing large input spans by limited neuronal encoding ranges. Deficits in adaptive coding of reward have previously been observed across the SZ spectrum and correlated with total symptom severity. In the present work we sought to establish whether adaptive coding is similarly affected in patients with BD. Methods: 25 patients with BD, 27 patients with SZ and 25 healthy controls performed a variant of the Monetary Incentive Delay task during functional magnetic resonance imaging in two reward range conditions. Results: Adaptive coding was impaired in BD and SZ in the posterior part of the right caudate. In contrast, BD did not show impaired adaptive coding in the anterior caudate and right precentral gyrus/insula, where SZ showed deficits compared to healthy controls. Conclusions: BD patients show adaptive coding deficits, that are similar to those observed in SZ in the right posterior caudate. Adaptive coding in BD appeared more preserved as compared to SZ participants especially in the more anterior part of the right caudate and to a lesser extent also in the right precentral gyrus. Thus, dysfunctional adaptive coding could constitute a fundamental deficit in severe mental illnesses that extends beyond the schizophrenia spectrum.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Weilun Sun ◽  
Ilseob Choi ◽  
Stoyan Stoyanov ◽  
Oleg Senkov ◽  
Evgeni Ponimaskin ◽  
...  

AbstractThe retrosplenial cortex (RSC) has diverse functional inputs and is engaged by various sensory, spatial, and associative learning tasks. We examine how multiple functional aspects are integrated on the single-cell level in the RSC and how the encoding of task-related parameters changes across learning. Using a visuospatial context discrimination paradigm and two-photon calcium imaging in behaving mice, a large proportion of dysgranular RSC neurons was found to encode multiple task-related dimensions while forming context-value associations across learning. During reversal learning requiring increased cognitive flexibility, we revealed an increased proportion of multidimensional encoding neurons that showed higher decoding accuracy for behaviorally relevant context-value associations. Chemogenetic inactivation of RSC led to decreased behavioral context discrimination during learning phases in which context-value associations were formed, while recall of previously formed associations remained intact. RSC inactivation resulted in a persistent positive behavioral bias in valuing contexts, indicating a role for the RSC in context-value updating.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurore Cazala ◽  
Catherine Del Negro ◽  
Nicolas Giret

AbstractThe ability of the auditory system to selectively recognize natural sound categories while maintaining a certain degree of tolerance towards variations within these categories, which may have functional roles, is thought to be crucial for vocal communication. To date, it is still largely unknown how the balance between tolerance and sensitivity to variations in acoustic signals is coded at a neuronal level. Here, we investigate whether neurons in a high-order auditory area in zebra finches, a songbird species, are sensitive to natural variations in vocal signals by recording their responses to repeated exposures to identical and variant sound sequences. We used the songs of male birds which tend to be highly repetitive with only subtle variations between renditions. When playing these songs to both anesthetized and awake birds, we found that variations between songs did not affect the neuron firing rate but the temporal reliability of responses. This suggests that auditory processing operates on a range of distinct timescales, namely a short one to detect variations in vocal signals, and longer ones that allow the birds to tolerate variations in vocal signal structure and to encode the global context.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 2979
Author(s):  
Suha Chang ◽  
David J. Freedman ◽  
Oliver Zhu
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viktor Plusnin ◽  
Olga Ivashkina ◽  
Ksenia Toropova ◽  
Vladimir Sotskov ◽  
Alisa Tiaglik ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron M. Williams ◽  
Christopher F. Angeloni ◽  
Maria Neimark Geffen

In everyday life, we integrate visual and auditory information in routine tasks such as navigation and communication. While it is known that concurrent sound can improve visual perception, the neuronal correlates of this audiovisual integration are not fully understood. Specifically, it remains unknown whether improvement of the detection and discriminability of visual stimuli due to sound is reflected in the neuronal firing patterns in the primary visual cortex (V1). Furthermore, presentation of the sound can induce movement in the subject, but little is understood about whether and how sound-induced movement contributes to V1 neuronal activity. Here, we investigated how sound and movement interact to modulate V1 visual responses in awake, head-fixed mice and whether this interaction improves neuronal encoding of the visual stimulus. We presented visual drifting gratings with and without simultaneous auditory white noise to awake mice while recording mouse movement and V1 neuronal activity. Sound modulated the light-evoked activity of 80% of light-responsive neurons, with 95% of neurons exhibiting increased activity when the auditory stimulus was present. Sound consistently induced movement. However, a generalized linear model revealed that sound and movement had distinct and complementary effects of the neuronal visual responses. Furthermore, decoding of the visual stimulus from the neuronal activity was improved with sound, an effect that persisted even when controlling for movement. These results demonstrate that sound and movement modulate visual responses in complementary ways, resulting in improved neuronal representation of the visual stimulus. This study clarifies the role of movement as a potential confound in neuronal audiovisual responses, and expands our knowledge of how multi-modal processing is mediated at a neuronal level in the awake brain.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurore Cazala ◽  
Catherine Del Negro ◽  
Nicolas Giret

The ability of the auditory system to selectively recognize natural sound categories with a tolerance to variations within categories is thought to be crucial for vocal communication. Subtle variations, however, may have functional roles. To date, how the coding of the balance between tolerance and sensitivity to variations in acoustic signals is performed at the neuronal level requires further studies. We investigated whether neurons of a high-order auditory area in a songbird species, the zebra finch, are sensitive to natural variations in vocal signals by recording responses to repeated exposure to similar and variant sound sequences. We took advantage of the intensive repetition of the male songs which subtly vary from rendition to rendition. In both anesthetized and awake birds, responses based on firing rate during sequence presentation did not show any clear sensitivity to these variations, unlike the temporal reliability of responses based on a 10 milliseconds resolution that depended on whether variant or similar sequences were broadcasted and the context of presentation. Results therefore suggest that auditory processing operates on distinct timescales, a short one to detect variations in individual's vocal signals, longer ones that allow tolerance in vocal signal structure and the encoding of the global context.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riccardo Caramellino ◽  
Eugenio Piasini ◽  
Andrea Buccellato ◽  
Anna Carboncino ◽  
Vijay Balasubramanian ◽  
...  

Efficient processing of sensory data requires adapting the neuronal encoding strategy to the statistics of natural stimuli. Humans, for instance, are most sensitive to multipoint correlations that vary the most across natural images. Here we show that rats possess the same sensitivity ranking to multipoint statistics as humans, thus extending a classic demonstration of efficient coding to a species where neuronal and developmental processes can be interrogated and causally manipulated.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iryna Yavorska ◽  
Michael Wehr

Movement has a prominent impact on activity in sensory cortex, but has opposing effects on visual and auditory cortex. Both cortical areas feature a vasoactive intestinal peptide-expressing (VIP) disinhibitory circuit, which in visual cortex contributes to the effect of running. In auditory cortex, however, the role of VIP circuitry in running effects remains poorly understood. Running and optogenetic VIP activation are known to differentially modulate sound-evoked activity in auditory cortex, but it is unknown how these effects vary across cortical layers, and whether laminar differences in the roles of VIP circuitry could contribute to the substantial diversity that has been observed in the effects of both movement and VIP activation. Here we asked whether VIP neurons contribute to the effects of running, across the layers of auditory cortex. We found that both running and optogenetic activation of VIP neurons produced diverse changes in the firing rates of auditory cortical neurons, but with distinct effects on spontaneous and evoked activity and with different patterns across cortical layers. On average, running increased spontaneous firing rates but decreased evoked firing rates, resulting in a reduction of the neuronal encoding of sound. This reduction in sound encoding was observed in all cortical layers, but was most pronounced in layer 2/3. In contrast, VIP activation increased both spontaneous and evoked firing rates, and had no net population-wide effect on sound encoding, but strongly suppressed sound encoding in layer 4 narrow-spiking neurons. These results suggest that VIP activation and running act independently, which we then tested by comparing the arithmetic sum of the two effects measured separately to the actual combined effect of running and VIP activation, which were closely matched. We conclude that the effects of locomotion in auditory cortex are not mediated by the VIP network.


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