Spontaneous events outline the realm of possible sensory responses in neocortical populations

By Artur Luczak, P. Barthó, Kenneth D. Harris. Neuron, 2009

611 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Neocortical assemblies produce complex activity patterns both in response to sensory stimuli, and spontaneously without sensory input. To investigate the structure of these patterns, we recorded from populations of 40–100 neurons in auditory and somatosensory cortices of anesthetized and awake rats using silicon microelectrodes. Population spike time patterns were broadly conserved across multiple sensory stimuli and spontaneous events. Although individual neurons showed timing variations between stimuli, these were not sufficient to disturb a generally conserved sequential organization observed at the population level, lasting for approximately 100ms with spiking reliability decaying progressively after event onset. Preserved constraints were also seen in population firing rate vectors, with vectors evoked by individual stimuli occupying subspaces of a larger but still constrained space outlined by the set of spontaneous events. These results suggest that population spike patterns are drawn from a limited “vocabulary,” sampled widely by spontaneous events but more narrowly by sensory responses.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e78e7cf62f77fd3cdf3418b385bdc256e0f5501

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Emergence of Dynamic Memory Traces in Cortical Microcircuit Models through STDP (2013, methodology): “This is the method that had been proposed in Luczak et al. (2009) for evaluating to what extent a firing order is preserved.”
Waking State: Rapid Variations Modulate Neural and Behavioral Responses (2015, neutral): “However, spontaneous activity is not random and is determined by the operation of similar or the same neural circuits involved in sensory responses (Arieli et al., 1996; Luczak et al., 2009).”
Sequential and efficient neural-population coding of complex task information (2019, neutral): “In many experiments, ours included (Figure 1A), the observed neural states appeared confined to a lower-dimensional region of the neural state space, termed the ‘‘neural manifold’’ (Aksay et al., 2003; Gallego et al., 2017; Ganguli and Sompolinsky, 2012; Hopfield and Tank, 1986; Jazayeri and Afraz, ”
Spontaneous and driven cortical activity: implications for computation. (2009, neutral): “Consistent with this notion of attractors, the cortical responses evoked by natural stimulation appear to be very similar to those observed spontaneously [26 ,27,28 ].”
Dimensionality reduction for large-scale neural recordings (2014, methodology): “…reduction has also been fruitfully applied to population recordings in other studies of decision-making 7–9 , the motor system 10–12 and the olfactory system 13,14 , as well as in working memory 15,16 , visual attention 17 , the auditory system 18 , rule learning 19 , speech 20 and more.”
On the methods for reactivation and replay analysis (2020, background): “Additionally, it is known that neural activity is constrained to a much smaller set of sequential patterns than pure randomness [64,65], thus making this a lower bound.”
Generative Predictive Codes by Multiplexed Hippocampal Neuronal Tuplets. (2018, neutral): “Cortical neuronal ensembles form rapid internal representations about the external world through the interplay between internally generated spontaneous neuronal dynamics and externally driven activity about the specific sensory dynamics of the world (Dragoi and Tonegawa, 2013c; Kenet et al., 2003; L”
From the neuron doctrine to neural networks (2015, background): “In fact, some of these stimulus-evoked activity patterns are similar to those that occur spontaneously 41,43,139–141 , as would be predicted from some dynamical network models 115 .”
Laminar structure of spontaneous and sensory-evoked population activity in auditory cortex (2009, neutral): “More generally, while a number of prior studies have described similarities in the structure of spontaneous and evoked activity (e.g., Kenet et al., 2003; Luczak et al., 2009; MacLean et al., 2005), we are not aware of previous reports of consistent differences between these two types of activity.”
Information Capacity and Transmission Are Maximized in Balanced Cortical Networks with Neuronal Avalanches (2010, background): “Indeed, studies suggest that ongoing activity is more diverse than typical stimulus-evoked activity (Fiser, 2004; Luczak et al., 2009; Churchland et al., 2010).”
Neuronal Avalanches Imply Maximum Dynamic Range in Cortical Networks at Criticality (2009, methodology): “Likewise, population responses to auditory and somatosensory stimuli fall within the repertoire of observed spontaneous events (Luczak et al., 2009).”