Information coding in sensory and executive brain

FERNANDEZ LEON, J.A.

Boston, Massachusetts

Exposición; Tye Lab Meetings (Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT); 2015

Tye Lab - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Preliminary work presented as talk finally published in https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/28/8/2675/3872353Natural viewing often consists of sequences of brief fixations to image patches of different structure. Whether and how briefly presented sequential stimuli are encoded in a temporal-position manner is poorly understood. Here, we performed multiple-electrode recordings in the visual cortex (area V4) of nonhuman primates (Macaca mulatta) viewing a sequence of 7 briefly flashed natural images, and measured correlations between the cue-triggered population response in the presence and absence of the stimulus. Surprisingly, we found significant correlations for images occurring at the beginning and the end of a sequence, but not for those in the middle. The correlation strength increased with stimulus exposure and favored the image position in the sequence rather than image identity. These results challenge the commonly held view that images are represented in visual cortex exclusively based on their informational content, and indicate that, in the absence of sensory information, neuronal populations exhibit reactivation of stimulus-evoked responses in a way that reflects temporal position within a stimulus sequence.