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On the structure of neuronal population activity under fluctuations in attentional state

View ORCID ProfileAlexander S. Ecker, View ORCID ProfileGeorge H. Denfield, View ORCID ProfileMatthias Bethge, View ORCID ProfileAndreas S. Tolias
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/018226
Alexander S. Ecker
1Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Tübingen, Germany
2Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
3Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany
4Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
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George H. Denfield
4Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
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Matthias Bethge
1Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Tübingen, Germany
2Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
3Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany
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Andreas S. Tolias
3Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany
4Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
5Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
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Abstract

Attention is commonly thought to improve behavioral performance by increasing response gain and suppressing shared variability in neuronal populations. However, both the focus and the strength of attention are likely to vary from one experimental trial to the next, thereby inducing response variability unknown to the experimenter. Here we study analytically how fluctuations in attentional state affect the structure of population responses in a simple model of spatial and feature attention. In our model, attention acts on the neural response exclusively by modulating each neuron’s gain. Neurons are conditionally independent given the stimulus and the attentional gain, and correlated activity arises only from trial-to-trial fluctuations of the attentional state, which are unknown to the experimenter. We find that this simple model can readily explain many aspects of neural response modulation under attention, such as increased response gain, reduced individual and shared variability, increased correlations with firing rates, limited range correlations, and differential correlations. We therefore suggest that attention may act primarily by increasing response gain of individual neurons without affecting their correlation structure. The experimentally observed reduction in correlations may instead result from reduced variability of the attentional gain when a stimulus is attended. Moreover, we show that attentional gain fluctuations – even if unknown to a downstream readout – do not impair the readout accuracy despite inducing limited-range correlations.

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Posted April 21, 2015.
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On the structure of neuronal population activity under fluctuations in attentional state
Alexander S. Ecker, George H. Denfield, Matthias Bethge, Andreas S. Tolias
bioRxiv 018226; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/018226
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On the structure of neuronal population activity under fluctuations in attentional state
Alexander S. Ecker, George H. Denfield, Matthias Bethge, Andreas S. Tolias
bioRxiv 018226; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/018226

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