Rarely categorical, always high-dimensional: how the neural code changes along the cortical hierarchy.

ABSTRACT: A long-standing debate in neuroscience concerns whether individual neurons are organized into functionally distinct populations that encode information differently ("categorical" representations [1-3]) and the implications for neural computation. Here, we systematically analyzed how cortical neurons encode cognitive, sensory, and movement variables across 43 cortical regions during a complex task (14,000+ units from the International Brain Laboratory public Brain-wide Map data set [4]) and studied how these properties change across the sensory-cognitive cortical hierarchy [5]. We found that the structure of the neural code was scale-dependent: on a whole-cortex scale, neural selectivity was categorical and organized across regions in a way that reflected their anatomical connectivity. Howe

SUBMITTER: Posani L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11601379 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature