ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2016
Limitations of Neural Map Topography for Decoding Spatial Information.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatial Subdomains in the Optic Tectum for the Encoding of Visual Information.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Population decoding of sound source location by receptive field neurons in the mouse superior colliculus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Characterization of Auditory Responsive Neurons in the Mouse Superior Colliculus to White Noise and Frequency-Restricted Sounds.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Distinct Neuron Types Contribute to Hybrid Auditory Spatial Coding.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Interactions between Guidance Cues and Neuronal Activity: Therapeutic Insights from Mouse Models.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- From perception to behavior: The neural circuits underlying prey hunting in larval zebrafish.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2023Review
- Whole-brain imaging of freely-moving zebrafish.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Review
- Topographic map formation and the effects of NMDA receptor blockade in the developing visual system.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Spatial Cognition in Teleost Fish: Strategies and Mechanisms.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
- Article
- Network Analysis of Murine Cortical Dynamics Implicates Untuned Neurons in Visual Stimulus Coding.Cell reports · 2020Article
- Article
- Functional Integration of Newborn Neurons in the Zebrafish Optic Tectum.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2019Review
- Probabilistic Encoding Models for Multivariate Neural Data.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2019Review
- Article
- Principles of Functional Circuit Connectivity: Insights From Spontaneous Activity in the Zebrafish Optic Tectum.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2018Review
- Characterisation of sensitivity and orientation tuning for visually responsive ensembles in the zebrafish tectum.Scientific reports · 2016Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
unlabelledTopographic maps are common throughout the nervous system, yet their functional role is still unclear. In particular, whether they are necessary for decoding sensory stimuli is unknown. Here we examined this question by recording population activity at the cellular level from the larval zebrafish tectum in response to visual stimuli at three closely spaced locations in the visual field. Due to map imprecision, nearby stimulus locations produced intermingled tectal responses, and decoding based on map topography yielded an accuracy of only 64%. In contrast, maximum likelihood decoding of stimulus location based on the statistics of the evoked activity, while ignoring any information about the locations of neurons in the map, yielded an accuracy close to 100%. A simple computational model of the zebrafish visual system reproduced these results. Although topography is a useful initial decoding strategy, we suggest it may be replaced by better methods following visual experience. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: A very common feature of brain wiring is that neighboring points on a sensory surface (eg, the retina) are connected to neighboring points in the brain. It is often assumed that this "topography" of wiring is essential for decoding sensory stimuli. However, here we show in the developing zebrafish that topographic decoding performs very poorly compared with methods that do not rely on topography. This suggests that, although wiring topography could provide a starting point for decoding at a very early stage in development, it may be replaced by more accurate methods as the animal gains experience of the world.
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