Fast Remapping of Sensory Stimuli onto Motor Actions on the Basis of Contextual Modulation

By Emilio Salinas. 2004

82 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Higher organisms can establish complex associations between sensory events and motor responses. More remarkable than their complexity, however, is that the resulting sensory-motor maps can be selectively interchanged. For example, a person who speaks English and Spanish can read aloud “con once, sin once,” going effortlessly from one language to the other. What is the neural basis of this capacity? Here, a network model is presented in which multiple maps between sensory stimuli and motor actions are possible, but only one of them, depending on behavioral context, is implemented at any given time. The key is a nonlinear representation in which the gain of sensory responses is regulated by context information. Neuronal responses can indeed show variations in gain, as has been documented in the case of proprioceptive signals such as eye and head position, which can modulate visually triggered activity. However, in contrast to these, the contextual cues used here need not bear any relationship to the physical attributes of the stimuli; in particular, spatial location is irrelevant. The model thus postulates the existence of sensory neurons that are nonlinearly modulated by arbitrary context signals, a plausible and testable prediction. The proposed mechanism allows a network of neurons to effectively change the functional connectivity between its inputs and outputs and may partially explain how animals can quickly adapt their behavior to varying environmental conditions.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Normalization as a canonical neural computation (2011, background): “A variety of studies address the computational advantages of gain modulatio”
An information integration theory of consciousness (2004, background): “As suggested by the regular finding of neurons showing multimodal responses that change depending on the context [36,37], the capacity of the thalamocortical system to integrate information is probably greatly enhanced by nonlinear switching mechanisms, such as gain modulation or synchronization, th”
Hierarchically organized behavior and its neural foundations: A reinforcement-learning perspective (2008, methodology): “Here, representations within prefrontal cortex correspond to option identifiers in HRL, while the stimulus-response pathways selected correspond to option-specific policies. respond to stimuli in a way that varies with task context (Ravel, Sardo, Legallet, & Apicella, 2006; see also Salinas, 2004).”
Why neurons mix: high dimensionality for higher cognition. (2016, methodology): “This kind of mixed selectivity to stimulus identity and to a context signal has been used to model visuomotor remapping [45–48].”
Motor learning with unstable neural representations. (2007, methodology): “Finally, in the future, our model should be extended to allow storage of multiple sensorimotor transformations, by including contextual inputs (e.g., Salinas, 2004).”
The Brain's Router: A Cortical Network Model of Serial Processing in the Primate Brain (2010, methodology): “behavior [33,45,46], task-setting neurons affect the decision process by gating a specific subset of ‘‘router’’ neurons, which implement the possible mappings between stimuli and responses.”
The Computational and Neural Basis of Cognitive Control: Charted Territory and New Frontiers (2014, background): “This has led to the development of the guided activation theory (GAT), which proposes that representations in prefrontal cortex (of tasks or goals) exert control over behavior by providing top–down biases that guide the flow of activity along processing pathways ( " intermediate units " ) in posteri”
Multilevel structure in behaviour and in the brain: a model of Fuster's hierarchy (2007, background): “grooming sequence (see also Salinas 2004). Finally, Botvinick & Bylsma (2005) tested and confirmed a counter-intuitive prediction of the BP04 model concerning the impact of momentary distraction on slips of action, and presented arguments for why the findings they obtained would be difficult to expl”