TY - JOUR
T1 - Odor Representations in Olfactory Cortex
T2 - Distributed Rate Coding and Decorrelated Population Activity
AU - Miura, Keiji
AU - Mainen, Zachary F.
AU - Uchida, Naoshige
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Haim Sompolinsky for stimulating discussions on population coding. We thank John Maunsell, Markus Meister, Alex Pouget and Rachel Wilson for their valuable comments on the manuscript. We also thank Kevin Cury, Rafi Haddad, Gabriel Kreiman, Eran Mukamel, Alice Wang, and other members of the Uchida lab for discussions. This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grant DC006104, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Champlimaud Foundation (Z.F.M.); Swartz Foundation, Smith Family New Investigator Award, Alfred Sloan Foundation, Milton Fund and start-up funding from Harvard University (N.U.). N.U. and Z.F.M. designed the experiments and wrote the paper. N.U. performed the experiments. K.M. performed the data analysis and helped writing the paper. N.U. and Z.F.M. helped with the data analysis.
PY - 2012/6/21
Y1 - 2012/6/21
N2 - How information encoded in neuronal spike trains is used to guide sensory decisions is a fundamental question. In olfaction, a single sniff is sufficient for fine odor discrimination but the neural representations on which olfactory decisions are based are unclear. Here, we recorded neural ensemble activity in the anterior piriform cortex (aPC) of rats performing an odor mixture categorization task. We show that odors evoke transient bursts locked to sniff onset and that odor identity can be better decoded using burst spike counts than by spike latencies or temporal patterns. Surprisingly, aPC ensembles also exhibited near-zero noise correlations during odor stimulation. Consequently, fewer than 100 aPC neurons provided sufficient information to account for behavioral speed and accuracy, suggesting that behavioral performance limits arise downstream of aPC. These findings demonstrate profound transformations in the dynamics of odor representations from the olfactory bulb to cortex and reveal likely substrates for odor-guided decisions.
AB - How information encoded in neuronal spike trains is used to guide sensory decisions is a fundamental question. In olfaction, a single sniff is sufficient for fine odor discrimination but the neural representations on which olfactory decisions are based are unclear. Here, we recorded neural ensemble activity in the anterior piriform cortex (aPC) of rats performing an odor mixture categorization task. We show that odors evoke transient bursts locked to sniff onset and that odor identity can be better decoded using burst spike counts than by spike latencies or temporal patterns. Surprisingly, aPC ensembles also exhibited near-zero noise correlations during odor stimulation. Consequently, fewer than 100 aPC neurons provided sufficient information to account for behavioral speed and accuracy, suggesting that behavioral performance limits arise downstream of aPC. These findings demonstrate profound transformations in the dynamics of odor representations from the olfactory bulb to cortex and reveal likely substrates for odor-guided decisions.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.04.021
DO - 10.1016/j.neuron.2012.04.021
M3 - Article
C2 - 22726838
AN - SCOPUS:84862703885
VL - 74
SP - 1087
EP - 1098
JO - Neuron
JF - Neuron
SN - 0896-6273
IS - 6
ER -