Biology subjects

Mayo, J. P.

Publications and source records attributed to Mayo, J. P..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

A Generalist Intracortical Motor Decoder

Mapping the relationship between neural activity and motor behavior is a central aim of sensori-motor neuroscience and neurotechnology. While most progress to this end has relied on restricting complexity, the advent of foundation models instead proposes integrating a breadth of data as an alternate avenue for broadly advancing downstream modeling. We quantify this premise for motor decoding from intracortical microelectrode data, pretraining an autoregressive Transformer on 2000 hours of neural population spiking activity paired with diverse motor covariates from over 30 monkeys and humans. The resulting model is broadly useful, benefiting decoding on 8 downstream decoding tasks and generalizing to a variety of neural distribution shifts. However, we also highlight that scaling autoregressive Transformers seems unlikely to resolve limitations stemming from sensor variability and output stereotypy in neural datasets. Code: https://github.com/joel99/ndt3

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Dissociation of attentional state and behavioral outcome using local field potentials

Successful behavior depends on attentional state and other factors related to decision-making, which may modulate neuronal activity differently. Here, we investigated whether attentional state and behavioral outcome (i.e., whether a target is detected or missed) are distinguishable using the power and phase of local field potential (LFP) recorded bilaterally from area V4 of monkeys performing a cued visual attention task. To link each trials outcome to pairwise measures of attention that are typically averaged across trials, we used several methods to obtain single-trial estimates of spike count correlation and phase consistency. Surprisingly, while attentional location was best discriminated using gamma and high-gamma power, behavioral outcome was best discriminated by alpha power and steady-state visually evoked potential. Power outperformed absolute phase in attentional/behavioral discriminability, although single-trial gamma phase consistency provided reasonably high attentional discriminability. Our results suggest a dissociation between the neuronal mechanisms that regulate attentional focus and behavioral outcome.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Microsaccades are directed towards the midpoint between targets in a variably cued attention task

Reliable, non-invasive biomarkers that reveal the internal state of a subject are an invaluable tool for neurological diagnoses. Small fixational eye movements, called microsaccades, are a candidate biomarker thought to reflect a subjects focus of attention (1, 2). The linkage between the direction of microsaccades and attention has mainly been demonstrated using explicit and unambiguous attentional cues. However, the natural world is seldom predictable and rarely provides unambiguous information. Thus, a useful biomarker must be robust to such changes in environmental statistics. To determine how well microsaccades reveal visual-spatial attention across behavioral contexts, we analyzed these fixational eye movements in monkeys performing a conventional change detection task. The task included two stimulus locations and variable cue validities across blocks of trials. Subjects were adept at the task, showing precise and graded modulations of visual attention for subtle target changes and performing better and faster when the cue was more reliable (3). However, over tens of thousands of microsaccades, we found no difference in microsaccade direction between cued locations when cue variability was high nor between hit and miss trials. Instead, microsaccades were made towards the midpoint of the two target locations, not towards individual targets. Our results suggest that the direction of microsaccades should be interpreted with caution and may not be a reliable measure of covert spatial attention in more complex viewing conditions. Significance StatementSmall fixational eye movements called microsaccades are thought to "point" towards a location that is being attended in the visual periphery. This phenomenon has largely been studied using visual cues that unambiguously indicate the location of the upcoming stimulus change. Because the natural world is rarely unambiguous, we studied the relationship between microsaccade direction and spatial attention using less reliable cues. We found that monkeys microsaccade directions in a standard visuospatial attention task did not indicate the animals focus of attention, despite behavioral and neuronal evidence of spatial attention. Instead, microsaccades were made towards the midpoint between the target locations in both animals, suggesting a more complex relationship between microsaccades and attention in naturalistic settings.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2020

Decoding of attentional state using high-frequency local field potential is as accurate as using spikes

Local field potentials (LFPs) in visual cortex are reliably modulated when the subjects focus of attention is cued into versus out of the receptive field of the recorded sites, similar to modulation of spiking activity. However, human psychophysics studies have used an additional attention condition, neutral cueing, for decades. The effect of neutral cueing on spiking responses was examined recently and found to be intermediate between cued and uncued conditions. However, whether LFPs are also precise enough to represent graded states of attention is unknown. We found that LFPs during neutral cueing were intermediate between cued and uncued conditions, and, for a single electrode, attention was more discriminable using high frequency (>30 Hz) LFP power than spikes. Surprisingly, spikes did not outperform LFPs even when discriminability was computed using multiple electrodes. These results constrain the spatial scale attention operates over and highlight the usefulness of LFPs in studying attention.

neuroscience↗