Abstract
A primary function of the brain is to form representations of the sensory world. Its capacity to do so depends on the relationship between signal correlations, associated with neuronal receptive fields, and noise correlations, associated with neuronal response variability. It was recently shown that the behavioral relevance of sensory stimuli can modify the relationship between signal and noise correlations, presumably increasing the encoding capacity of the brain. In this work, we use data from the visual cortex of the awake mouse watching naturalistic stimuli and show that a similar modification is observed under heightened cholinergic modulation. Increasing cholinergic levels in the cortex through optogenetic stimulation of basal forebrain cholinergic neurons decreases the dependency that is commonly observed between signal and noise correlations. Simulations of correlated neural networks with realistic firing statistics indicate that this change in the correlation structure increases the encoding capacity of the network.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 5725-5730 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| Volume | 114 |
| Issue number | 22 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 30 2017 |
Funding
We thank Anita Disney, Andrew Alexander, and Laleh Quinn for suggestions and help with the manuscript. This work was supported by NIH Grant R01 EY018861, National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant 22250400-42533 (to Y.D.), Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award F31NS084696 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (to L.P.), NSF Science of Learning Center Grant SMA 1041755 to the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (to V.M. and A.A.C.), and National Institute of Mental Health R01 MH110514 01 (to A.A.C.).
Keywords
- Acetylcholine
- Neural coding
- Neural correlations
- Neuromodulation
- Sensory processing
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General