ArticleeLife2020
How many neurons are sufficient for perception of cortical activity?
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers.
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Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed, 128 citations in OpenAlex.
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- 2P-FENDO-II: A fiber bundle microscope for all-optical, large field-of-view brain studies in freely moving mice.Cell reports methods · 2026Article
- Active pixel power control for crosstalk-free all-optical neural interrogation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Triggering action potentials of a single neuron by multiphoton excitation elicits visually guided behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neural mechanisms underlying intracortical microstimulation for sensory restoration.Nature biomedical engineering · 2026Review
- Critical scaling of novelty in the cortex.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Technical development of two-photon optogenetic stimulation and its potential application to brain-machine interfaces.Neurophotonics · 2026Review
- Desensitization of opsin responses during all-optical interrogation depends on imaging parameters.Neurophotonics · 2026Article
- Environmental Novelty Modulates Rapid Cortical Plasticity During Navigation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The spatial frequency representation predicts category coding in the inferior temporal cortex.eLife · 2025Article
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- Multiphoton Neurophotonics: Recent Advances in Imaging and Manipulating Neuronal Circuits.ACS photonics · 2025Review
- Unraveling the neural code: analysis of large-scale two-photon microscopy data.Microscopy (Oxford, England) · 2025Review
- The Duality of Astrocyte Neuromodulation: Astrocytes Sense Neuromodulators and Are Neuromodulators.Journal of neurochemistry · 2025Review
- Information transfer and recovery for the sense of touch.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Many theories of brain function propose that activity in sparse subsets of neurons underlies perception and action. To place a lower bound on the amount of neural activity that can be perceived, we used an all-optical approach to drive behaviour with targeted two-photon optogenetic activation of small ensembles of L2/3 pyramidal neurons in mouse barrel cortex while simultaneously recording local network activity with two-photon calcium imaging. By precisely titrating the number of neurons stimulated, we demonstrate that the lower bound for perception of cortical activity is ~14 pyramidal neurons. We find a steep sigmoidal relationship between the number of activated neurons and behaviour, saturating at only ~37 neurons, and show this relationship can shift with learning. Furthermore, activation of ensembles is balanced by inhibition of neighbouring neurons. This surprising perceptual sensitivity in the face of potent network suppression supports the sparse coding hypothesis, and suggests that cortical perception balances a trade-off between minimizing the impact of noise while efficiently detecting relevant signals.
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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.