Neural codes for perceptual discrimination in primary somatosensory cortex

We sought to determine the neural code(s) for frequency discrimination of vibrotactile stimuli. We tested five possible candidate codes by analyzing the responses of single neurons recorded in primary somatosensory cortex of trained monkeys while they discriminated between two consecutive vibrotactile stimuli. Differences in the frequency of two stimuli could be discriminated using information from (i) time intervals between spikes, (ii) average spiking rate during each stimulus, (iii) absolute number of spikes elicited by each stimulus, (iv) average rate of bursts of spikes or (v) absolute number of spike bursts elicited by each stimulus. However, only a spike count code, in which spikes are integrated over a time window that has most of its mass in the first 250 ms of each stimulus period, covaried with behavior on a trial-by-trial basis, was consistent with psychophysical biases induced by manipulation of stimulus duration, and produced neurometric discrimination thresholds similar to behavioral psychophysical thresholds.

[1]  S. Siegel,et al.  Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences , 2022, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[2]  G. Poggio,et al.  TIME SERIES ANALYSIS OF IMPULSE SEQUENCES OF THALAMIC SOMATIC SENSORY NEURONS. , 1964, Journal of neurophysiology.

[3]  N. Draper,et al.  Applied Regression Analysis , 1966 .

[4]  D. M. Green,et al.  Signal detection theory and psychophysics , 1966 .

[5]  V. Mountcastle,et al.  The sense of flutter-vibration: comparison of the human capacity with response patterns of mechanoreceptive afferents from the monkey hand. , 1968, Journal of neurophysiology.

[6]  J. Hyvärinen,et al.  Cortical neuronal mechanisms in flutter-vibration studied in unanesthetized monkeys. Neuronal periodicity and frequency discrimination. , 1969, Journal of neurophysiology.

[7]  Norman R. Draper,et al.  Applied regression analysis (2. ed.) , 1981, Wiley series in probability and mathematical statistics.

[8]  William Bialek,et al.  Reading a Neural Code , 1991, NIPS.

[9]  B. Connors,et al.  Intrinsic firing patterns of diverse neocortical neurons , 1990, Trends in Neurosciences.

[10]  R. Romo,et al.  Frequency discrimination in the sense of flutter: psychophysical measurements correlated with postcentral events in behaving monkeys , 1990, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[11]  S. Shott,et al.  Nonparametric Statistics , 2018, The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences.

[12]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical Recipes in C, 2nd Edition , 1992 .

[13]  G. Recanzone,et al.  Changes in the distributed temporal response properties of SI cortical neurons reflect improvements in performance on a temporally based tactile discrimination task. , 1992, Journal of neurophysiology.

[14]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical Recipes in Fortran 77: The Art of Scientific Computing 2nd Editionn - Volume 1 of Fortran Numerical Recipes , 1992 .

[15]  K. H. Britten,et al.  Power spectrum analysis of bursting cells in area MT in the behaving monkey , 1994, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[16]  Michael N. Shadlen,et al.  Noise, neural codes and cortical organization , 1994, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[17]  K. H. Britten,et al.  A relationship between behavioral choice and the visual responses of neurons in macaque MT , 1996, Visual Neuroscience.

[18]  Emilio Salinas,et al.  Discrimination in the Sense of Flutter: New Psychophysical Measurements in Monkeys , 1997, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[19]  A. Parker,et al.  Sense and the single neuron: probing the physiology of perception. , 1998, Annual review of neuroscience.

[20]  W. Newsome,et al.  The Variable Discharge of Cortical Neurons: Implications for Connectivity, Computation, and Information Coding , 1998, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[21]  R. Romo,et al.  Somatosensory discrimination based on cortical microstimulation , 1998, Nature.

[22]  R. Romo,et al.  Neuronal correlates of parametric working memory in the prefrontal cortex , 1999, Nature.

[23]  S J Bolanowski,et al.  Vibrotactile temporal summation: probability summation or neural integration? , 1999, Somatosensory & motor research.

[24]  C. Koch,et al.  Encoding of visual information by LGN bursts. , 1999, Journal of neurophysiology.

[25]  R. Romo,et al.  Sensing without Touching Psychophysical Performance Based on Cortical Microstimulation , 2000, Neuron.

[26]  A. Zador,et al.  Neural representation and the cortical code. , 2000, Annual review of neuroscience.

[27]  R. Romo,et al.  Neuronal correlates of sensory discrimination in the somatosensory cortex. , 2000, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[28]  R. Romo,et al.  Periodicity and Firing Rate As Candidate Neural Codes for the Frequency of Vibrotactile Stimuli , 2000, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[29]  M. Carandini,et al.  Visual cortex: Fatigue and adaptation , 2000, Current Biology.

[30]  R. Romo,et al.  Touch and go: decision-making mechanisms in somatosensation. , 2001, Annual review of neuroscience.

[31]  D. Hubel,et al.  The function of bursts of spikes during visual fixation in the awake primate lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[32]  R. Romo,et al.  Temporal Evolution of a Decision-Making Process in Medial Premotor Cortex , 2002, Neuron.

[33]  R. Romo,et al.  Neuronal correlates of decision-making in secondary somatosensory cortex , 2002, Nature Neuroscience.

[34]  Xiao-Jing Wang,et al.  Bursting Neurons Signal Input Slope , 2002, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[35]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical recipes in C , 2002 .

[36]  Emilio Salinas,et al.  Cognitive neuroscience: Flutter Discrimination: neural codes, perception, memory and decision making , 2003, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[37]  Maria V. Sanchez-Vives,et al.  Electrophysiological classes of cat primary visual cortical neurons in vivo as revealed by quantitative analyses. , 2003, Journal of neurophysiology.

[38]  J. Movshon,et al.  Neuronal Adaptation to Visual Motion in Area MT of the Macaque , 2003, Neuron.

[39]  R. Romo,et al.  Timing and neural encoding of somatosensory parametric working memory in macaque prefrontal cortex. , 2003, Cerebral cortex.

[40]  R. Romo,et al.  Correlated Neuronal Discharges that Increase Coding Efficiency during Perceptual Discrimination , 2003, Neuron.

[41]  R. Romo,et al.  Neuronal Correlates of a Perceptual Decision in Ventral Premotor Cortex , 2004, Neuron.

[42]  Fabrizio Gabbiani,et al.  Burst firing in sensory systems , 2004, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[43]  John F. Kalaska,et al.  Faculty Opinions recommendation of Neuronal correlates of a perceptual decision in ventral premotor cortex. , 2004 .

[44]  N. Wittenburg,et al.  Transformation from temporal to rate coding in a somatosensory thalamocortical pathway , 2022 .

[45]  R. K. Simpson.  Nature Neuroscience , 2022 .