Biology subjects

Kording, K.

Publications and source records attributed to Kording, K..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Rate fluctuations not steps dominate LIP activity during decision-making

The idea that lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) integrates information for and against a decision, is one of the most popular models in neuroscience. However, a recent statistical analysis has suggested that LIP does not integrate information but that individual neurons activities jump. The result was based on a model comparison, which is often hard to interpret. There are two worries that can render comparisons problematic. (1) Important aspects of variance are contained in neither model. (2) The analysis is complicated, making it hard to verify. We thus followed up with a simple approach for model comparison: crossvalidation. We find evidence that baseline fluctuations describe much of the variance, which are properly modeled by neither the original papers drift-diffusion model, nor simple ramp or step models. Moreover, we find that our straightforward analysis strategy prefers ramping models, both with and without trial-by-trial baseline fluctuations. Our analysis, implementable in a few lines of code, suggests the importance of simple analyses.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Spiking allows neurons to estimate their causal effect

When a neuron is driven beyond its threshold it spikes, and the fact that it does not communicate its continuous membrane potential is usually seen as a computational liability. Here we show that this spiking mechanism allows neurons to produce an unbiased estimate of their causal influence, and a way of approximating gradient descent learning. Importantly, neither activity of upstream neurons, which act as confounders, nor downstream non-linearities bias the results. By introducing a local discontinuity with respect to their input drive, we show how spiking enables neurons to solve causal estimation and learning problems.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

The Development Of Bayesian Integration In Sensorimotor Estimation

If the brain is inherently Bayesian, then behavior should show the signatures of Bayesian computation from an early stage in life without the need for learning. Children should integrate probabilistic information from prior and likelihood distributions to reach decisions and should be as statistically efficient as adults. To test this idea, we examined the integration of prior and likelihood information in a simple position estimation task comparing children aged 6-11 years and adults. During development, estimation performance became closer to the statistical optimum. Children use likelihood information as well as adults but are limited in their use of priors. This finding suggests that Bayesian behavior is not inherent but learnt over the course of development.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Policies or Knowledge: Priors differ between perceptual and sensorimotor tasks

If the brain abstractly represents probability distributions as knowledge, then the modality of a decision, e.g. movement vs perception, should not matter. If on the other hand, learned representations are policies, they may be specific to the task where learning takes place. Here, we test this by asking if a learned spatial prior generalizes from a sensorimotor estimation task to a two-alternative-forced choice (2-Afc) perceptual comparison task. A model and simulation-based analysis revealed that while participants learn the experimentally-imposed prior distribution in the sensorimotor estimation task, measured priors are consistently broader than expected in the 2-Afc task. That the prior does not fully generalize suggests that sensorimotor priors strongly resemble policies. In disagreement with standard Bayesian thought, the modality of the decision has a strong influence on the implied prior distribution.\n\nNEW AND NOTEWORTHYWe do not know if the brain represents abstract and generalizable knowledge or task-specific policies that map internal states to actions. We find that learning in a sensorimotor task does not generalize strongly to a perceptual task, suggesting that humans learned policies and did not truly acquire knowledge. Priors differ across tasks, thus casting doubt on the central tenet of may Bayesian models, that the brains representation of the world is built on generalizable knowledge.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2016

A cryptography-based approach for movement decoding

Brain decoders use neural recordings to infer a users activity or intent. To train a decoder, we generally need infer the variables of interest (covariates) using simultaneously measured neural activity. However, there are many cases where this approach is not possible. Here we overcome this problem by introducing a fundamentally new approach for decoding called distribution alignment decoding (DAD). We use the statistics of movement, much like cryptographers use the statistics of language, to find a mapping between neural activity and motor variables. DAD learns a linear decoder which aligns the distribution of its output with the typical distribution of motor outputs by minimizing their KL-divergence. We apply our approach to a two datasets collected from the motor cortex of non-human primates (NHPs): a reaching task and an isometric force production task. We study the performance of DAD and find regimes where DAD provides comparable and in some cases, better performance than a typical supervised decoder. As DAD does not rely on the ability to record motor-related outputs, it promises to broaden the set of potential applications of brain decoding.

neuroscience↗