Descending pathways increase sensory neural response heterogeneity to facilitate decoding and behavior.

ABSTRACT: The functional role of heterogeneous spiking responses of otherwise similarly tuned neurons to stimulation, which has been observed ubiquitously, remains unclear to date. Here, we demonstrate that such response heterogeneity serves a beneficial function that is used by downstream brain areas to generate behavioral responses that follows the detailed timecourse of the stimulus. Multi-unit recordings from sensory pyramidal cells within the electrosensory system of Apteronotus leptorhynchus were performed and revealed highly heterogeneous responses that were similar for all cell types. By comparing the coding properties of a given neural population before and after inactivation of descending pathways, we found that heterogeneities were beneficial as decoding was then more robust to the

SUBMITTER: Metzen MG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10320509 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature