Title Information
Title
Decision-Related Feedback Influences the Structure of Correlated Variability in Visual Cortex
Name: Personal
Name Part
Bondy, Adrian G
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Origin Information
Copyright Date
2015
Physical Description
Extent
17, 130 p.
digitalOrigin
born digital
Note
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
Name: Personal
Name Part
Cumming, Bruce
Role
Role Term: Text
Director
Name: Personal
Name Part
Wurtz, Robert
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Sheinberg, David
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Shadlen, Michael
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Corporate
Name Part
Brown University. Neuroscience
Role
Role Term: Text
sponsor
Genre (aat)
theses
Abstract
Sensory neurons exhibit unpredictable spiking responses to fixed sensory input. Some of this response variability is correlated between neuronal pairs. This correlated variability (spike-count correlation; rsc) is thought to impair judgments about the stimulus, because these rely on statistical decisions based on pooling many sensory neurons. However, a portion of the correlated variability may in fact reflect variability in modulatory/feedback inputs. How such common inputs impact the neuronal representation of sensory events is poorly understood. An important experimental constraint can be provided by quantifying the portion of rsc that derives from feedback. We confine our analysis to the structured rsc thought to be important for perceptual judgments. In this dissertation, I present results from population recordings in macaque primary visual cortex (V1) while subjects perform a coarse orientation discrimination task using filtered noise stimuli. Given current models, the presence of choice-related activity (Choice Probability; CP) implies that rsc structure take a particular form. I empirically demonstrate that the rsc structure in area V1 (along the orientation dimension) is compatible with these predictions. However, I show quantitatively that this is mostly due to common inputs which change dynamically with the subject’s task (i.e. the set of orientations being discriminated), strongly implying a feedback origin. I also show quantitatively that CP is mostly due to the portion of rsc structure that changes dynamically with the task. This is compatible with the view that signals related to a subject’s perceptual choice are fed back to V1 neurons supporting that choice, and that CP is mostly due to this feedback. In addition, I show that the structured spike-count correlations that change dynamically with the subject’s task degrade the perceptual performance of an ideal observer of the V1 population. This is because they introduce fluctuations in the V1 representation that mimic the effect of changing the stimulus along the dimension being discriminated. I discuss what these results imply about the nature of the common feedback inputs that appear to underlie rsc structure, and discuss possible feedforward effects the resulting spikes may have on a perceptual decision.
Subject
Topic
neural coding
Subject
Topic
neural decoding
Subject
Topic
neural encoding
Subject
Topic
Choice Probability
Subject
Topic
differential correlations
Subject
Topic
V1
Subject
Topic
noise correlations
Subject
Topic
psychophysical reverse correlation
Subject
Topic
macaque psychophysics
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/889035")
Topic
Decision making
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1168011")
Topic
Visual cortex
Record Information
Record Content Source (marcorg)
RPB
Record Creation Date (encoding="iso8601")
20160629
Language
Language Term: Code (ISO639-2B)
eng
Language Term: Text
English
Identifier: DOI
10.7301/Z0D50KCG
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access
Collection is open for research.
Type of Resource (primo)
dissertations