Information Theoretic Analysis of the Neurophysiology Associated with Visual Task Learning

[摘要] Understanding the neural correlates of learning is a key goal in neuroscience. Repeated trials of a delayed match-to-sample task were carried out by two rhesus macaques for a recent work pursuing this goal. We investigated coupling and information flow between clusters of visual cortical local field potentials from the same data set in their work with the aim of discovering how activity and performance relate on days where monkeys were learning. Coupling was measured via mutual information in frequency, a recently introduced metric without any model assumptions and the ability to capture nonlinearity. Coupling was found to be significantly heightened in the theta band for trials when matches were presented, and this theta coupling was strongly associated with performance on match trials. In contrast, theta coupling was generally uncorrelated with non-match performance. Analysis of information flow via directed information also revealed generally heightened information flow between clusters for match trials.

[发布机构] Rice University

[效力级别] Task