Sahoo Bikash, Snyder Adam C
Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627.
J Neurosci. 2025 May 14;45(20):e1733242025. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1733-24.2025.
The unfolding of neural population activity can be described as a dynamical system. Stability in the latent dynamics that characterize neural population activity has been linked with consistency in animal behavior, such as motor control or value-based decision-making. However, whether such characteristics of neural dynamics can explain visual perceptual behavior is not well understood. To study this, we recorded V4 populations in two male monkeys engaged in a non-match-to-sample visual change-detection task that required sustained engagement. We measured how the stability in the latent dynamics in V4 might affect monkeys' perceptual behavior. Specifically, we reasoned that unstable sensory neural activity around dynamic attractor boundaries may make animals susceptible to taking incorrect actions when withholding action would have been correct ("false alarms"). We made three key discoveries: (1) greater stability was associated with longer trial sequences; (2) false alarm rate decreased (and response times slowed) when neural dynamics were more stable; and (3) low stability predicted false alarms on a single-trial level, and this relationship depended on the position of the neural activity within the state space, consistent with the latent neural state approaching an attractor boundary. Our results suggest the same outward false alarm behavior can be attributed to two different potential strategies that can be disambiguated by examining neural stability: (1) premeditated false alarms that might lead to greater stability in population dynamics and faster response time and (2) false alarms due to unstable sensory activity consistent with misperception.
神经群体活动的展开可以被描述为一个动态系统。表征神经群体活动的潜在动力学中的稳定性已与动物行为的一致性相关联，如运动控制或基于价值的决策。然而，神经动力学的这些特征是否能解释视觉感知行为，目前还不太清楚。为了研究这一点，我们在两只参与需要持续参与的非匹配样本视觉变化检测任务的雄性猴子身上记录了V4区的神经群体活动。我们测量了V4区潜在动力学的稳定性如何影响猴子的感知行为。具体来说，我们推断，在动态吸引子边界周围不稳定的感觉神经活动可能会使动物在本应正确地不采取行动时容易采取错误行动（“误报”）。我们有三个关键发现：（1）更高的稳定性与更长的试验序列相关；（2）当神经动力学更稳定时，误报率降低（反应时间减慢）；（3）低稳定性在单次试验水平上预测误报，并且这种关系取决于神经活动在状态空间中的位置，这与潜在神经状态接近吸引子边界一致。我们的结果表明，相同的外在误报行为可以归因于两种不同的潜在策略，通过检查神经稳定性可以区分这两种策略：（1）可能导致群体动力学更大稳定性和更快反应时间的有预谋的误报，以及（2）与感知错误一致的由不稳定感觉活动导致的误报。
