Neuron
Volume 108, Issue 3, 11 November 2020, Pages 551-567.e8
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Article
Slow Drift of Neural Activity as a Signature of Impulsivity in Macaque Visual and Prefrontal Cortex

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Highlights

  • Perceptual behavior naturally shifts over tens of minutes in a discrimination task

  • A slow drift in visual area V4 is a neural correlate of this behavior

  • Neurons in multiple brain areas (V4 and prefrontal cortex) share the same slow drift

  • The slow drift acts as a brain-wide impulsivity signal, overriding sensory evidence

Summary

An animal’s decision depends not only on incoming sensory evidence but also on its fluctuating internal state. This state embodies multiple cognitive factors, such as arousal and fatigue, but it is unclear how these factors influence the neural processes that encode sensory stimuli and form a decision. We discovered that, unprompted by task conditions, animals slowly shifted their likelihood of detecting stimulus changes over the timescale of tens of minutes. Neural population activity from visual area V4, as well as from prefrontal cortex, slowly drifted together with these behavioral fluctuations. We found that this slow drift, rather than altering the encoding of the sensory stimulus, acted as an impulsivity signal, overriding sensory evidence to dictate the final decision. Overall, this work uncovers an internal state embedded in population activity across multiple brain areas and sheds further light on how internal states contribute to the decision-making process.

Keywords

vision
decision making
slow drift
neural population
visual area V4
prefrontal cortex
PFC
stimulus encoding
neural fluctuation
impulsivity
arousal

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