Abstract

Please join us for our fortnightly Computational Neuroscience journal club on Tuesday 25th April at 2pm UK time in the CBL seminar room, or online on zoom. The title is ‘Non-necessary activity in cortex’, presented by Alejandro Tabas and Theoklitos Amvrosiadis.

Summary:

Neurophysiologists often hypothesise that neural tuning to animal choices in decision making experiments indicates that the studied cortical area plays a causal role in task performance. In this journal club we will discuss several studies that challenge this assumption. We will first discuss two studies showing that animal decisions can be decoded from cortical areas whose deactivation does not impair or alter behavioural performance. We will then examine the role that uninstructed movements plays in the generation of this so-called non-necessary activity.

References:

Tremblay, S., Testard, C., Inchauspé, J, Petrides, M. Non-necessary neural activity in the primate cortex. bioRxiv 2022.09.12.506984; https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.12.506984

Katz, L., Yates, J., Pillow, J. et al. Dissociated functional significance of decision-related activity in the primate dorsal stream. Nature 535, 285–288 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18617

Tremblay, S., Testard, C., DiTullio, R.W. et al. Neural cognitive signals during spontaneous movements in the macaque. Nat Neurosci 26, 295–305 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-022-01220-4

Musall, S., Kaufman, M.T., Juavinett, A.L. et al. Single-trial neural dynamics are dominated by richly varied movements. Nat Neurosci 22, 1677–1686 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0502-4