RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Visuomotor association orthogonalizes visual cortical population codes
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.05.23.445338
DO 10.1101/2021.05.23.445338
A1 Failor, Samuel W.
A1 Carandini, Matteo
A1 Harris, Kenneth D.
YR 2024
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2024/07/04/2021.05.23.445338.abstract
AB Training in behavioral tasks can alter visual cortical stimulus coding, but the precise form of this plasticity is unclear. We measured orientation tuning in 4,000-neuron populations of mouse V1 before and after training on a visuomotor task. Changes to single-cell tuning curves were apparently complex, including appearance of asymmetric and multi-peaked tuning curves. Nevertheless, these changes reflected a simple mathematical transformation of population activity, suppressing responses to motor-associated stimuli specifically in cells responding at intermediate levels. The strength of the transformation varied across trials, suggesting a dynamic circuit mechanism rather than static synaptic plasticity. This transformation resulted in sparsening and orthogonalization of population codes for motor-associated stimuli. Training did not improve the performance of an optimal stimulus decoder, which was already perfect even for naïve codes, but the resulting orthogonalization improved the performance of a suboptimal decoder model with inductive bias as might be found in downstream readout circuits.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.