Elsevier

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Volume 25, April 2014, Pages 211-220
Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Variability in neural activity and behavior

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2014.02.013Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Insufficient knowledge by the experimenter results in neural variability.

  • What counts as variability for the experimenter and for the organism may be different.

  • The sources of variability can be targeted through modeling studies.

  • Variability may have an adaptive functional role.

Neural activity and behavior in laboratory experiments are surprisingly variable across trials. This variability and its potential causes have been the focus of a spirited debate. Here we review recent research that has shed light on the sources of neural variability and its impact on behavior. We explain how variability may arise from incomplete knowledge about an animal's internal states and its environment. We discuss the problem of incomplete knowledge both from the experimenter's point of view and from the animal's point of view. Both view points are illustrated through several examples from the literature. We furthermore consider both mechanistic and normative models that explain how neural and behavioral variability may be linked. Finally, we review why variability may confer an adaptive advantage to organisms.

Introduction

Behavior is variable and often unpredictable. While some external events trigger only one specific behavior, such as a reflex, most external events trigger one out of many possible behaviors in a seemingly stochastic fashion. This behavioral variability is also observed in the laboratory, and can rarely be avoided completely. The colloquial Harvard Law of Animal Behavior sums it up as follows: ‘Under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, an animal will behave as it damned well pleases.’

Just as behavior is variable, so is the activity of neurons. This variability is observed in essentially all neural recordings, and even in the absence of behavior. Over the last two decades, many studies have quantified neural variability during the performance of well-controlled behavioral tasks. These studies have thereby opened the door to explore the relationship between neural and behavioral variability. Focusing on a sensory area, the pioneering work by Britten and colleagues showed that neural activity and behavioral choice covary on a trial-by-trial basis, even if the stimulus is constant [1]. This early work suggested that random fluctuations in the processing of sensory stimuli could be at the origin of behavioral variability. More recent work has rekindled interest in this topic, showing that the answer is more elusive than originally thought, and highlighting the flexible nature of neural variability across task conditions and behavioral states.

Here, we review recent research that addresses the relationship between neural and behavioral variability. We focus on studies of perceptual decision-making and consider three different, but related aspects of the problem: What is the origin of the observed neural variability? How does neural variability impact behavior? Finally, what are the functional or adaptive roles that neural variability may play?

Section snippets

Sources of neural variability

In the classical, reductionist approach, we seek to explain changes in some target variables (say, neural activity) by changes in some other variables (say, an external stimulus). In any particular neurophysiological experiment, not all factors that influence the targeted neural activity can be controlled or monitored. Unknown influences range from thermodynamic fluctuations in the state of ion channels to the various internal states of an organism. Since we lack access to these unknown or

Controllable sources of variability

In the classic experiments of Britten and colleagues, monkeys were trained to discriminate the overall direction of motion of a random dot pattern 1, 2. More specifically, the behaviorally relevant information was provided by the fraction of dots moving in a coherent direction. However, many distinct patterns of random dot motion are compatible with a given motion coherence, and neurons in cortical area MT are extremely sensitive to these fine-grained dot patterns, especially at low coherences

Uncontrollable sources of variability

The strong coupling of widely different spatial and temporal scales in biological systems in general, and in the nervous system in particular, generates sources of variability that are difficult to control. One obvious example are microscopic fluctuations of small structural components of neurons, such as ion channels or the synaptic machinery involved in vesicle release [27]. Although the precise impact of this microscopic noise on neural variability remains unclear, it can, in principle, be

Neural versus behavioral variability: normative approaches

In the same way that the experimenter needs to determine which variables affect neural activity, neural circuits need to properly allocate responsibility to the diverse influences that can change their synaptic inputs. In solving this inference problem, the brain may use processing strategies that appear inefficient or suboptimal, as recently proposed by Beck and colleagues [47]. Ideally, neural circuits should retain the relevant aspects of their complex and high-dimensional inputs (the

Neural versus behavioral variability: mechanistic approaches

The relation between neural and behavioral variability was first quantitatively characterized in the context of the classical random dot motion discrimination task, with the remarkable observation that trial-to-trial fluctuations in the activity of single neurons in monkey area MT evoked by stimuli of the same coherence were correlated with behavioral choice [1], a tendency referred to as choice probability (CP). This relationship between neural variability and choice was formalized in the

The functional roles of behavioral variability

Is variability a bug or a feature? Variability may be a feature if it provides adaptive benefits to the organism. A simple case of such adaptive benefits at the behavioral level is exploration. The need to explore new possibilities may benefit from a stochastic strategy. In the theory of reinforcement learning, for instance, the tradeoff between exploring something new or exploiting the already known is handled probabilistically 64, 65. Since all environments change over time, animals can

Conclusions

The relation between neural and behavioral variability is key to understanding how brains generate behavior. A lot of insight about this relation has been gained during the last decade, and yet it seems as if we merely scratched the surface. In any particular experiment, all of the effects mentioned above are likely to play a role, from uncontrolled environmental variables to noise generated within the nervous system, including contributions linked to specific processing strategies used by the

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

Acknowledgements

We thank Nuno Calaim, Asma Motiwala and Claudia Feierstein for comments on the manuscript. A.R. and C.K.M acknowledge support from the Champalimaud Foundation.

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