ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2020
A Sparse Probabilistic Code Underlies the Limits of Behavioral Discrimination.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 9 citations in OpenAlex.
- Information transfer and recovery for the sense of touch.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Highly unstable heterogeneous representations in VIP interneurons of the anterior cingulate cortex.Molecular psychiatry · 2022Article
- Different Forms of Variability Could Explain a Difference Between Human and Rat Decision Making.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The cortical code that underlies perception must enable subjects to perceive the world at time scales relevant for behavior. We find that mice can integrate visual stimuli very quickly (<100 ms) to reach plateau performance in an orientation discrimination task. To define features of cortical activity that underlie performance at these time scales, we measured single-unit responses in the mouse visual cortex at time scales relevant to this task. In contrast to high-contrast stimuli of longer duration, which elicit reliable activity in individual neurons, stimuli at the threshold of perception elicit extremely sparse and unreliable responses in the primary visual cortex such that the activity of individual neurons does not reliably report orientation. Integrating information across neurons, however, quickly improves performance. Using a linear decoding model, we estimate that integrating information over 50-100 neurons is sufficient to account for behavioral performance. Thus, at the limits of visual perception, the visual system integrates information encoded in the probabilistic firing of unreliable single units to generate reliable behavior.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.