Implications of correlated neuronal noise in decision making circuits for physiology and behavior

Abstract

Understanding how the activity of sensory neurons contribute to perceptual decision making is one of the major questions in neuroscience. In the current standard model, the output of opposing pools of noisy, correlated sensory neurons is integrated by downstream neurons whose activity elicits a decision-dependent behavior [1][2]. The predictions of the standard model for empirical measurements like choice probability (CP), psychophysical kernel (PK) and reaction time distribution crucially depend on the spatial and temporal correlations within the pools of sensory neurons. This dependency has so far only been investigated numerically and for time-invariant correlations and variances. However, it has recently been shown that the noise variance undergoes significant changes over the course of the stimulus presentation [3]. The same is true for inter-neuronal correlations that have been shown to change with task …

Matthias Bethge
Matthias Bethge
Professor for Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning & Director of the Tübingen AI Center

Matthias Bethge is Professor for Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen and director of the Tübingen AI Center, a joint center between Tübingen University and MPI for Intelligent Systems that is part of the German AI strategy.