Endogenous activity modulates stimulus and circuit-specific neural tuning and predicts perceptual behavior

Abstract

Perception reflects not only sensory inputs, but also the endogenous state when these inputs enter the brain. Prior studies show that endogenous neural states influence stimulus processing through non-specific, global mechanisms, such as spontaneous fluctuations of arousal. It is unclear if endogenous activity influences circuit and stimulus-specific processing and behavior as well. Here we use intracranial recordings from 30 pre-surgical epilepsy patients to show that patterns of endogenous activity are related to the strength of trial-by-trial neural tuning in different visual category-selective neural circuits. The same aspects of the endogenous activity that relate to tuning in a particular neural circuit also correlate to behavioral reaction times only for stimuli from the category that circuit is selective for. These results suggest that endogenous activity can modulate neural tuning and influence behavior in a circuit- and stimulus-specific manner, reflecting a potential mechanism by which endogenous neural states facilitate and bias perception.

Dynamic Domain Specificity In Human Ventral Temporal Cortex

“…Note that the locations of face and word selective electrodes are more distributed than is typically reported in group-level neuroimaging studies (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006), though they are consistent with the individual variability seen in other imaging modalities (Glezer & Riesenhuber, 2013;Weiner & Grill-Spector, 2013;Gao, Gentile & Rossion, 2018;Zhen et al, 2015;Rossion et al, 2012;Cohen et al, 2002;Dehaene et al, 2004;White et al, 2019) and are consistent with prior iEEG studies (Li et al, 2020, Hagen et al, 2020Matsuo et al, 2015;Jacques et al, 2020;Lochy et al, 2018). See Boring et al (2021) and Figure 1 of Li et al (2019) for a more thorough examination of the iEEG-derived map of VTC category selectivity, including illustrations of individual subjects from these localizer results and a map that includes all categories used.…”

Connectomics of Human Electrophysiology

“…Interestingly however, both scalp and intracranial studies using decoding approaches have demonstrated that the influence of baseline activity is not limited to general processes but extends to specific sensory representations. In particular, prestimulus oscillation power (and phase: Li et al, 2020) in sensory areas can be used to directly decode stimulus-specific task-relevant information (Kayser et al, 2016) and modulates post-stimulus decoding of behaviour in a regionby-stimulus specific manner (Li et al, 2020). Interestingly, a recent MEG study suggests that a general process and stimulus-specific information may be concurrently present in different aspects of ongoing activity (Podvalny et al, 2019).…”

Upgrading Voxel-wise Encoding Model via Integrated Integration over Features and Brain Networks

“…Voxels that are not clustered spatially may also correlated through functional networks and shared both stimulus-driven and non-stimulus endogenous activity. 35 Thus we hypothesize that the function-induced cluster-based encoding model provides complementary prediction power to the anatomy-induced model. Second, a brain region may participate in multiple perception processes that could be better captured by different computational models.…”

“…On the targeting neural activity side, it is often overlooked in the previous studies that both the stimulus-driven and the spontaneous parts of the neural activity show strong correlating structure at local and network levels. [33][34][35][36] Thus we ask if we could incorporate correlated activity into the model by harnessing local and network local level structures in the neural activity to facilitate accurate neural encoding prediction. On the stimulus side, existing literature usually extracts feature representations from the stimuli by picking the optimal feature representation from a candidate model pool using model-selection procedures.…”