Neuronal circuits underlying persistent representations despite time varying activity.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Our brains are capable of remarkably stable stimulus representations despite time-varying neural activity. For instance, during delay periods in working memory tasks, while stimuli are represented in working memory, neurons in the prefrontal cortex, thought to support the memory representation, exhibit time-varying neuronal activity. Since neuronal activity encodes the stimulus, its time-varying dynamics appears to be paradoxical and incompatible with stable network stimulus representations. Indeed, this finding raises a fundamental question: can stable representations only be encoded with stable neural activity, or, its corollary, is every change in activity a sign of change in stimulus representation?

Results

Here we explain how different time-varying representa

SUBMITTER: Druckmann S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3543774 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature