Neuroscience – Page 8 – The Miller Lab @ MIT

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Oct 2017

Clustering and compositionality of task representations in a neural network trained to perform many cognitive tasks

Miller Lab

Neuroscience

An example of mixed selectivity in a network model trained on 20 different cognitive tasks.
Yang, G. R., Song, H. F., Newsome, W. T., & Wang, X. J. (2017). Clustering and compositionality of task representations in a neural network trained to perform many cognitive tasks. bioRxiv, 183632.

To learn more about mixed selectivity and its importance for cognition, see these papers:
Rigotti, M., Barak, O., Warden, M.R., Wang, X., Daw, N.D., Miller, E.K., & Fusi, S. (2013) The importance of mixed selectivity in complex cognitive tasks. Nature, 497, 585-590, doi:10.1038/nature12160. View PDF »

Fusi, S., Miller, E.K., and Rigotti, M. (2016) Why neurons mix: High dimensionality for higher cognition. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 37:66-74 doi:10.1016/j.conb.2016.01.010. View PDF »
2

Oct 2017

A theory of working memory without consciousness or sustained activity

Miller Lab

Neuroscience

There is a growing consensus that there may be more to working memory than simple maintenance of spiking. On a single-trial, moment-to-moment basis, memory delay spiking is sparse, not sustained. Instead, spiking may produce changes in synaptic weights and that is where the working memories are actually stored.

Trübutschek, D., Marti, S., Ojeda, A., King, J. R., Mi, Y., Tsodyks, M., & Dehaene, S. (2017). A theory of working memory without consciousness or sustained activity. Elife, 6.

For further reading see:
Lunqvist, M., Rose, J., Herman, P, Brincat, S.L, Buschman, T.J., and Miller, E.K. (2016) Gamma and beta bursts underlie working memory. Neuron, published online March 17, 2016. View PDF »
2

Oct 2017

Mechanisms of Persistent Activity in Cortical Circuits: Possible Neural Substrates for Working Memory

Miller Lab

Miller Laboratory, Neuroscience

Review of the neural mechanisms behind persistent spiking activity and working memory.

Zylberberg, J., & Strowbridge, B. W. (2017). Mechanisms of persistent activity in cortical circuits: possible neural substrates for working memory. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 40.

There is little doubt that spiking during memory delays play a role in working memory. But how persistent is the activity and how are the memories actually stored? For another perspective see:
Lunqvist, M., Rose, J., Herman, P, Brincat, S.L, Buschman, T.J., and Miller, E.K. (2016) Gamma and beta bursts underlie working memory. Neuron, published online March 17, 2016. View PDF »
2

Oct 2017

Got Rhythm? Better Inhibitory Control Is Linked with More Consistent Drumming and Enhanced Neural Tracking of the Musical Beat in Adult Percussionists and Nonpercussionists

Miller Lab

Neuroscience

The title says it all.

Slater, J., Ashley, R., Tierney, A., & Kraus, N. (2017). Got Rhythm? Better Inhibitory Control Is Linked with More Consistent Drumming and Enhanced Neural Tracking of the Musical Beat in Adult Percussionists and Nonpercussionists. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
29

Sep 2017

Disruption of Conscious Access in Schizophrenia

Miller Lab

Neuroscience

Due to a disruption of top-down attentional amplification.

Berkovitch, L., Dehaene, S., & Gaillard, R. (2017). Disruption of Conscious Access in Schizophrenia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
29

Sep 2017

New results: Gradual progression from sensory to task-related processing in cerebral cortex

Miller Lab

Miller Laboratory, Neuroscience

Gradual progression from sensory to task-related processing in cerebral cortex
Scott L. Brincat*, Markus Siegel*, Constantin von Nicolai, Earl K. Miller
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/195602

Abstract

Somewhere along the cortical hierarchy, behaviorally relevant information is distilled from raw sensory inputs. We examined how this transformation progresses along multiple levels of the hierarchy by comparing neural representations in visual, temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices in monkeys categorizing across three visual domains (shape, motion direction, color). Representations in visual areas MT and V4 were tightly linked to external sensory inputs. In contrast, prefrontal cortex (PFC) largely represented the abstracted behavioral relevance of stimuli (task rule, motion category, color category). Intermediate-level areas — posterior inferotemporal (PIT), lateral intraparietal (LIP), and frontal eye fields (FEF) — exhibited mixed representations. While the distribution of sensory information across areas aligned well with classical functional divisions — MT carried stronger motion information, V4 and PIT carried stronger color and shape information — categorical abstraction did not, suggesting these areas may participate in different networks for stimulus-driven and cognitive functions. Paralleling these representational differences, the dimensionality of neural population activity decreased progressively from sensory to intermediate to frontal cortex. This shows how raw sensory representations are transformed into behaviorally relevant abstractions and suggests that the dimensionality of neural activity in higher cortical regions may be specific to their current task.
27

Sep 2017

How thoughts arise from sights: inferotemporal and prefrontal contributions to vision

Miller Lab

Neuroscience

A review of how the prefrontal cortex and high-level visual cortex interact during perception.

Kornblith, S., & Tsao, D. Y. (2017). How thoughts arise from sights: inferotemporal and prefrontal contributions to vision. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 46, 208-218.
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Sep 2017

Oscillatory Dynamics of Prefrontal Cognitive Control

Miller Lab

Neuroscience

“The Functional Architecture of Cognition Is Rhythmic”. Indeed.

Randolph F. Helfrich, Robert T. Knight, Oscillatory Dynamics of Prefrontal Cognitive Control, In Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 20, Issue 12, 2016, Pages 916-930, ISSN 1364-6613, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.09.007.
26

Sep 2017

Prefrontal cortex modulates posterior alpha oscillations during top-down guided visual perception

Miller Lab

Neuroscience

Rhythmic coupling across the cortex underlies perception.

Randolph F. Helfrich, Melody Huang, Guy Wilson, and Robert T. Knight
Prefrontal cortex modulates posterior alpha oscillations during top-down guided visual perception
PNAS 2017 114 (35) 9457-9462; published ahead of print August 14, 2017, doi:10.1073/pnas.1705965114
26

Sep 2017

A distributed, hierarchical and recurrent framework for reward-based choice.

Miller Lab

Neuroscience

Distributed networks, not functional modules, are where it’s at in the 21st century.

This paper argues that decisions come from repeated computations that are distributed across many brain regions. This fits with the distributed nature of neural coding.

Nat Rev Neurosci. 2017 Feb 17;18(3):172-182. doi: 10.1038/nrn.2017.7.
A distributed, hierarchical and recurrent framework for reward-based choice.
Hunt LT, Hayden BY

For further reading:
Siegel, M., Buschman, T.J., and Miller, E.K. (2015) Cortical information flow during flexible sensorimotor decisions. Science. 19 June 2015: 1352-1355. View PDF »

Abstract