Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making
Abstract
Abstract The neural representations of prior information about the state of the world are poorly understood 1 . Here, to investigate them, we examined brain-wide Neuropixels recordings and widefield calcium imaging collected by the International Brain Laboratory. Mice were trained to indicate the location of a visual grating stimulus, which appeared on the left or right with a prior probability alternating between 0.2 and 0.8 in blocks of variable length. We found that mice estimate this prior probability and thereby improve their decision accuracy. Furthermore, we report that this subjective prior is encoded in at least 20% to 30% of brain regions that, notably, span all levels of processing, from early sensory areas (the lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex) to motor regions (secondary and primary motor cortex and gigantocellular reticular nucleus) and high-level cortical regions (the dorsal anterior cingulate area and ventrolateral orbitofrontal cortex). This widespread representation of the prior is consistent with a neural model of Bayesian inference involving loops between areas, as opposed to a model in which the prior is incorporated only in decision-making areas. This study offers a brain-wide perspective on prior encoding at cellular resolution, underscoring the importance of using large-scale recordings on a single standardized task.
Article Details
Authors (61)
Charles Findling
Félix Hubert
Luigi Acerbi
Brandon Benson
Julius Benson
Daniel Birman
Niccolò Bonacchi
E. Kelly Buchanan
Sebastian Bruijns
Matteo Carandini
Joana A. Catarino
Gaelle A. Chapuis
Anne K. Churchland
Yang Dan
Felicia Davatolhagh
Eric E. J. DeWitt
Tatiana A. Engel
Michele Fabbri
Mayo A. Faulkner
Ila Rani Fiete
Laura Freitas-Silva
Berk Gerçek
Kenneth D. Harris
Michael Häusser
Sonja B. Hofer
Fei Hu
Julia M. Huntenburg
Anup Khanal
Chris Krasniak
Christopher Langdon
Christopher A. Langfield
Peter E. Latham
Petrina Y. P. Lau
Zach Mainen
Guido T. Meijer
Nathaniel J. Miska
Thomas D. Mrsic-Flogel
Jean-Paul Noel
Kai Nylund
Alejandro Pan-Vazquez
Liam Paninski
Jonathan Pillow
Cyrille Rossant
Noam Roth
Rylan Schaeffer
Michael Schartner
Yanliang Shi
Karolina Z. Socha
Nicholas A. Steinmetz
Karel Svoboda
Charline Tessereau
Anne E. Urai
Miles J. Wells
Steven Jon West
Matthew R. Whiteway
Olivier Winter
Ilana B. Witten
Anthony Zador
Yizi Zhang
Peter Dayan
Alexandre Pouget