Topic: goal-directed behaviors

Task-related neural activity is widespread across populations of neurons during goal-directed behaviors. However, little is known about the synaptic reorganization and circuit mechanisms that lead to broad activity changes. Here we trained a limited subset of neurons in a spiking network with strong synaptic interactions to reproduce the activity of neurons in the motor cortex during a decision-making task. We found that task-related activity, resembling the neural data, emerged across the network, even in the untrained neurons. Analysis of trained networks showed that strong untrained synapse

GPR158, a class C orphan G protein-coupled receptor, has been shown to function as a metabotropic glycine receptor. The nucleus accumbens (NAc), a significant basal ganglia component that integrates data from cortical and subcortical structures to drive goal-directed behaviors, exhibits high levels of GPR158 expression. It is unknown, however, how GPR158 activation affects the NAc's neuronal activity. Using whole-cell patch-clamp recordings we found that glycine-dependent activation of GPR158 elevates evoked firing of NAc medium spiny neurons (MSNs), while activation of GPR158 in cholinergic i

Quantifying the contribution of dynamically changing neural activity to goal-directed behaviors is a longstanding problem in neuroscience. One approach is to systematically test how behaviors map to individual firing rates at each time step, but it is less clear how behaviors map to complex neural latent dynamics. In recent years deep learning approaches have become powerful tools to extract these latent dynamics (Schneider, Lee, Mathis 2023), yet how to probe them in order to attribute input neurons to latents remains challenging. Gradient-based attribution is one of the methods that aim to e