Costa Renan M, Luo Jiaqi K, Salvino Peter S, Ackert-Smith Lyn A, Ibarra Shawna M, Pinto Lucas
Department of Neuroscience, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago IL USA.
Department of Neurobiology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston IL USA.
bioRxiv. 2025 Jul 24:2025.07.24.666672. doi: 10.1101/2025.07.24.666672.
Most decisions involve multiple cognitive processes. Recent findings suggest that these processes are distributed across the cortex, but that single regions implement them via orthogonal population-activity patterns. How are these local geometries combined across the cortex? Here, we designed a virtual-navigation task for mice that dissociates the accumulation and short-term memory of sensory evidence, and choice. Combining dimensionality reduction and decoding models with cortex-wide widefield Ca imaging, we observed distributed but near-orthogonal coding subspaces for these different cognitive processes, and that this geometry breaks down during erroneous choices. Further, only the memory subspace corresponded to a spontaneous activity-timescale hierarchy, suggesting that it co-opts intrinsic circuit properties. Thus, we reconcile previous findings by showing that cortex-wide dynamics supporting distinct cognitive processes are disentangled.
大多数决策涉及多个认知过程。最近的研究结果表明，这些过程分布在整个皮层，但单个区域通过正交的群体活动模式来实现它们。这些局部几何结构是如何在整个皮层中组合的呢？在这里，我们为小鼠设计了一个虚拟导航任务，该任务可区分感觉证据的积累、短期记忆和选择。将降维和解码模型与全皮层宽场钙成像相结合，我们观察到了这些不同认知过程的分布式但近乎正交的编码子空间，并且这种几何结构在错误选择时会瓦解。此外，只有记忆子空间对应于自发活动时间尺度层次结构，这表明它利用了内在电路特性。因此，我们通过表明支持不同认知过程的全皮层动力学是相互分离的，来调和先前的研究结果。
