Dissecting the causal role of neural dynamics in supporting computation and behavior
Abstract
Recent advances in neural recording technologies have enabled researchers to simultaneouslyrecord from hundreds to thousands of neurons in the brains of behaving animals. Theseincreasingly rich neural data present exciting new opportunities for understanding how" the brainperforms computations and generates sophisticated behavior. However, deriving thisunderstanding from such complex, high-"dimensional data will require novel analyticalapproaches capable of extracting and parsing structure from the data (Cunningham & Yu", 2014).Recent work has suggested that population-level dynamics may be a hallmark of neuralcomputation and the generation of skil""led behavior (Churchland et al., 2012). However, itremains unclear whether neural dynamics play a causal role in supporting computa""tion andbehavior, or whether such dynamics merely appear as an epiphenomenon . Here, we propose todevelop rich population-level dy"namical models of neural activity for testing the hypothesis thatpopulation-level dynamics are crucial in supporting the neural computations underlyingperceptual decision making and the behaviors generated to reflect those decision s.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 20, 2018
- Source ID
- N000141812158
Entities
People
- Krishna Shenoy
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- Stanford University
- United States Navy