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Journal of Neuroscience, Vol 16, 1486-1510, Copyright © 1996 by Society for Neuroscience
A computational analysis of the relationship between neuronal and behavioral responses to visual motion
MN Shadlen, KH Britten, WT Newsome and JA Movshon
Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, California 94305, USA.
We have documented previously a close relationship between neuronal
activity in the middle temporal visual area (MT or V5) and behavioral
judgments of motion (Newsome et al., 1989; Salzman et al., 1990; Britten et
al., 1992; Britten et al., 1996). We have now used numerical simulations to
try to understand how neural signals in area MT support psychophysical
decisions. We developed a model that pools neuronal responses drawn from
our physiological data set and compares average responses in different
pools to produce psychophysical decisions. The structure of the model
allows us to assess the relationship between "neuronal" input signals and
simulated psychophysical performance using the same methods we have applied
to real experimental data. We sought to reconcile three experimental
observations: psychophysical performance (threshold sensitivity to motion
stimuli embedded in noise), a trial-by-trial covariation between the neural
response and the monkey's choices, and a modest correlation between pairs
of MT neurons in their variable responses to identical visual stimuli. Our
results can be most accurately simulated if psychophysical decisions are
based on pools of at least 100 weakly correlated sensory neurons. The
neurons composing the pools must include a broader range of sensitivities
than we encountered in our MT recordings, presumably because of the
inclusion of neurons whose optimal stimulus is different from the one being
discriminated. Central sources of noise degrade the signal-to-noise ratio
of the pooled signal, but this degradation is relatively small compared
with the noise typically carried by single cortical neurons. This suggests
that our monkeys base near-threshold psychophysical judgments on signals
carried by populations of weakly interacting neurons; these populations
include many neurons that are not tuned optimally for the particular
stimuli being discriminated.
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