Bahmani Hamed, Li Qinglin, Logothetis Nikos K, Keliris Georgios A
Department of Physiology of Cognitive Processes, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany.
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Tuebingen, Germany.
Front Syst Neurosci. 2019 Mar 12;13:9. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2019.00009. eCollection 2019.
Discovering neural correlates of subjective perception and dissociating them from sensory input has fascinated neuroscientists for a long time. Bistable and multistable perception phenomena have exhibited great experimental potential to address this question. Here, we performed electrophysiological recordings from single neurons in lateral intraparietal area (LIP) of rhesus macaques during stimulus and perceptual transitions induced by binocular flash suppression (BFS). LIP neurons demonstrated transient bursts of activity after stimulus presentation and stimulus or perceptual switches but only a minority of cells demonstrated stimulus and perceptual selectivity. To enhance LIP neural selectivity, we performed a second experiment in which the competing stimuli were associated with asymmetric rewards. We found that transient and sustained activities substantially increased while the proportion of stimulus selective neurons remained approximately the same, albeit with increased selectivity magnitude. In addition, we observed mild increases in the proportion of perceptually selective neurons which also showed increase magnitude of selectivity. Importantly, the increased selectivity of cells after the reward manipulation was not directly reflecting the reward size but an enhancement in stimulus differentiation. Based on our results, we conjecture that LIP contributes to perceptual transitions and serves a modulatory role in perceptual selection taking into account the stimulus behavioral value.
发现主观感知的神经关联并将它们与感觉输入区分开来，长期以来一直吸引着神经科学家。双稳态和多稳态感知现象在解决这个问题上展现出了巨大的实验潜力。在这里，我们在由双眼闪光抑制（BFS）诱导的刺激和感知转换期间，对恒河猴顶内沟外侧区（LIP）的单个神经元进行了电生理记录。LIP神经元在刺激呈现、刺激或感知切换后表现出短暂的活动爆发，但只有少数细胞表现出刺激和感知选择性。为了增强LIP神经选择性，我们进行了第二个实验，其中竞争性刺激与不对称奖励相关联。我们发现，短暂和持续活动大幅增加，而刺激选择性神经元的比例大致保持不变，尽管选择性幅度有所增加。此外，我们观察到感知选择性神经元的比例略有增加，其选择性幅度也有所增加。重要的是，奖励操作后细胞选择性的增加并非直接反映奖励大小，而是刺激区分能力的增强。基于我们的结果，我们推测LIP有助于感知转换，并在考虑刺激行为价值的感知选择中发挥调节作用。
