We are excited to present a Brain-Wide Map of neural activity during a complex decision-making behavior, a product of the monumental effort of 22 labs: 547 Neuropixels recordings in 267 brain regions from 115 mice collected in 11 labs (1/8)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.04.547681v2
#neuroscience
How does complex behavior emerge from hundreds of brain areas processing information related to sensation, decisions, actions, and prior beliefs? We tackled this question by recording spiking activity across the entire brain in mice engaged in the IBL decision-making task https://elifesciences.org/articles/63711. (2/8)
With a battery of analysis tools, we examined which brain regions and in which order carried signals about visual stimuli, the mouse's choice, prior expectation, movements, and reward .
Explore our results at https://atlas.internationalbrainlab.org/?alias=bwm and the data for each recording at https://viz.internationalbrainlab.org/app (first loading can take time) (3/8)
Visual stimuli elicited transient responses in traditional visual areas followed by ramping activity in midbrain and hindbrain regions, consistent with their role in decision making. (4/8)
The upcoming choice (before the first movement on a trial) was represented across the cortex, basal ganglia, thalamus, midbrain, hindbrain, and cerebellum. (5/8)
The neural representation of movement and feedback/reward consumption were particularly widespread, reflecting brain-wide changes in neural activity. (6/8)
Surprisingly, the block prior was represented by few neurons in very few regions. To investigate this further, we devoted a whole companion paper to it, where additional analyses discovered widespread representations of the prior. (7/8)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.04.547684v1
It's finally out! Excited to see science that we've been working on for 3+ years in (pre)print at long last. The data is open to the public, and the IBL team has done an excellent job creating a data downloading/loading/manipulating interface that is truly easy and intuitive.