Topic: behavioral decisions

Spike trains recorded from the cortex of behaving animals can be complex, highly variable from trial to trial, and therefore challenging to interpret. A fraction of cells exhibit obvious trial-averaged, task-related responses such as pure tone frequency tuning in auditory cortex. However, a substantial number of cells do not appear to fire in a task-related manner and are often neglected from analysis. Previous work used a novel single-trial, spike-timing-based analysis to show that both classically and non-classically responsive cortical neurons contain significant information about sensory s

The integration of sensory inputs from different senses is a crucial aspect of sensory perception and behavioral decisions. Whether such multisensory integration occurs at specific stages of neural processing remains unclear. Two brain regions, the anterolateral motor cortex (ALM) and the superior colliculus (SC) are important parts of a cortico-subcortical loop that transforms multisensory inputs into behavioral decisions. To study the role of these areas in multisensory integration and decision-making, we trained mice in a multisensory discrimination task, where animals had to integrate visu