Long-term stability of cortical population dynamics underlying consistent behavior

By Juan Alvaro Gallego, M. Perich, Raeed H. Chowdhury, Sara A. Solla, Lee E. Miller. 2020

351 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Animals readily execute learned behaviors in a consistent manner over long periods of time, and yet no equally stable neural correlate has been demonstrated. How does the cortex achieve this stable control? Using the sensorimotor system as a model of cortical processing, we investigated the hypothesis that the dynamics of neural latent activity, which captures the dominant co-variation patterns within the neural population, must be preserved across time. We recorded from populations of neurons in premotor, primary motor and somatosensory cortices as monkeys performed a reaching task, for up to 2 years. Intriguingly, despite a steady turnover in the recorded neurons, the low-dimensional latent dynamics remained stable. The stability allowed reliable decoding of behavioral features for the entire timespan, while fixed decoders based directly on the recorded neural activity degraded substantially. We posit that stable latent cortical dynamics within the manifold are the fundamental building blocks underlying consistent behavioral execution. Gallego, Perich et al. report that latent dynamics in the neural manifold across three cortical areas are stable throughout years of consistent behavior. The authors posit that these dynamics are fundamental building blocks of learned behavior.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Natural continual learning: success is a journey, not (just) a destination (2021, methodology): “We also found that the task-associated dynamics were subsequently conserved during further learning, consistent with experimental reports of stable neural representations (Dhawale et al., 2017; Gallego et al., 2020; Jensen et al., 2021a).”
Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, background): “Motor cortical trajectories Finally, recordings of motor cortical activity during stereotyped primate arm movements reveal the existence of stable low-dimensional trajectories [84, 222, 223, 224, 225], similar to the trajectories in state space originally characterized in olfactory circuit responses”