Global Postdoc/Student Meeting

The Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain is launching a virtual program-wide postdoc and student group meeting to bring together trainees interested in neural coding and dynamics to discuss ideas and data. Register for the meeting here.

Our inaugural speaker is:

Fanny Cazettes
Postdoctoral Researcher, Mainen Laboratory
Champalimaud Center for the Unknown
A basis set for accumulation of action outcomes in the mouse frontal cortex

Whereas many computations are performed by the brain in parallel, some behaviors proceed serially or interfere, a phenomenon attributed to capacity limitations in central fronto-parietal networks. Temporal accumulation of evidence has been suggested to contribute to this processing bottleneck as a limited resource allocated according to task relevance, but the efficiency of temporal accumulation of evidence regardless of task-relevance has not been explicitly investigated. Here we show that neural populations in the mouse frontal cortex simultaneously represent a full basis set for temporal accumulation and reset of different streams of action outcomes, spanning several seconds and regardless of behavioral relevance. Mice performed a foraging task in which they had to infer, through the selective temporal accumulation of some action outcomes but not others, a particular latent variable predicting reward. Although, consistent with the optimal task strategy, only this latent variable predicted choice, all latent variables corresponding to accumulation and reset of both action outcomes could be linearly decoded with similar accuracy. Our results show that behavioral relevance does not automatically modulate temporal accumulation in the frontal cortex, suggesting that this computation can be run in parallel and by default on multiple sensory streams.

Please note: This event is open to all postdocs and PhD students in SCGB-funded labs as well as SCGB Fellows. Please contact [email protected] with any questions. Sign up for the series mailing list here.