Journal
NATURE NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 9, Issue 11, Pages 1412-1420Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nn1792
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Funding
- NEI NIH HHS [R01 EY016454, R01 EY016752, R01 EY016752-01] Funding Source: Medline
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Even the simplest environmental stimuli elicit responses in large populations of neurons in early sensory cortical areas. How these distributed responses are read out by subsequent processing stages to mediate behavior remains unknown. Here we used voltage-sensitive dye imaging to measure directly population responses in the primary visual cortex ( V1) of monkeys performing a demanding visual detection task. We then evaluated the ability of different decoding rules to detect the target from the measured neural responses. We found that small visual targets elicit widespread responses in V1, and that response variability at distant sites is highly correlated. These correlations render most previously proposed decoding rules inefficient relative to one that uses spatially antagonistic center-surround summation. This optimal decoder consistently outperformed the monkey in the detection task, demonstrating the sensitivity of our techniques. Overall, our results suggest an unexpected role for inhibitory mechanisms in efficient decoding of neural population responses.
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