
==== Front
bioRxiv
BIORXIV
bioRxiv
2692-8205
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

10.1101/2024.09.06.611738
preprint
1
Article
Neural Dynamics Underlying False Alarms in Extrastriate Cortex
Sahoo Bikash http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4570-2316

Snyder Adam C. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1794-035X

12 9 2024
2024.09.06.611738https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.
http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/2024.09.06.611738
nihpp-2024.09.06.611738.pdf
Summary

The unfolding of neural population activity can be approximated as a dynamical system. Stability in the latent dynamics that characterize neural population activity has been linked with consistency in animal behavior, such as motor control or value-based decision-making. However, whether similar dynamics characterize perceptual activity and decision-making in the visual cortex is not well understood. To test this, we recorded V4 populations in monkeys engaged in a non-match-to-sample visual change-detection task that required sustained engagement. We measured how the stability in the latent dynamics in V4 might affect monkeys’ perceptual behavior. Specifically, we reasoned that unstable sensory neural activity around dynamic attractor boundaries may make animals susceptible to taking incorrect actions when withholding action would have been correct (“false alarms”). We made three key discoveries: 1) greater stability was associated with longer trial sequences; 2) false alarm rate decreased (and reaction times slowed) when neural dynamics were more stable; and, 3) low stability predicted false alarms on a single-trial level, and this relationship depended on the elapsed time during the trial, consistent with the latent neural state approaching an attractor boundary. Our results suggest the same outward false alarm behavior can be attributed to two different potential strategies that can be disambiguated by examining neural stability: 1) premeditated false alarms that might lead to greater stability in population dynamics and faster reaction time and 2) false alarms due to unstable sensory activity consistent with misperception.
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pmc
