UE917 - NEURO 202 - Cognitive neurophysiology: attention, perception, decision

Intervenant·e·s

• Yves Boubenec [référent·e]   maître de conférences, ENS

The aim of this course is to introduce the audience with classical and cutting edge research articles focusing on the neurophysiology of decision-making. We will study the interplay between bottom-up and top-down factors during the selection of relevant information. The emphasis will be on electrophysiological recordings across multiple areas (from sensory to frontal cortices) in behaving animals.

Each week a student will present one paper from a set of articles proposed in advance.

The first class is an Introductory class, in which there will be a lecture on the basics of attention and decision-making in parietal and frontal cortices. The following classes class will be composed of the article presentation, including the discussion between the attendees, the presenter, and the instructor. The second part of the class will be a wrap-up lecture to put the results of the article in a broader context. Dates of classes are shown in a section below.

The list of papers evolves from year to year, to stay at the cutting edge of ongoing research. You can find below a list of the paper that will be proposed for this year’s class (updated for the class in 2020):

• How do we switch between rules? Neural correlates of task switching in prefrontal cortex and primary auditory cortex in a novel stimulus selection task for rodents. Rodgers and de Weese, 2014
• Can we find decision in sensory cortex? (I) Causal contribution of primate auditory cortex to auditory perceptual decision-making. Tsunada et al., 2016
• Can we find decision in sensory cortex? (II) Sensory and decision-related activity propagate in a cortical feedback loop during touch perception. Kwon et al., 2016
• Going up the hierarchy: how is sensory signal passed through the cortical hierarchy? Cortical information flow during flexible sensorimotor decisions. Siegel et al., 2015
•  Does seeing a decision signal in a brain area involve a causal role in decision? Dissociated functional significance of decision-related activity in the primate dorsal stream. Katz et al., 2016 and (these are two short papers) Posterior parietal cortex plays a causal role in perceptual and categorical decisions. Zhou and Freedman, 2019
• How do we get rid of distractors? Distinct neural mechanisms of distractor suppression in the frontal and parietal lobe. Suzuki and Gottlieb, 2013
• Updating in a changing world; how is the PFC up to the task? (I) Dynamic coding for cognitive control in prefrontal cortex. Stokes et al., 2013
• Updating in a changing world; how is the PFC up to the task? (II) Mixed selectivity morphs population codes in prefrontal cortex. Parthasarathy et al., 2017
• Moving and sensing: how is movement represented in sensory areas? Single-trial neural dynamics are dominated by richly varied movements. Musal et al., 2019
• How to prepare to move without moving? Cortical activity in the null space: permitting preparation without movement. Kaufman et al., 2014
• How to effectively control muscular activity from a motor cortex? Independent representations of ipsilateral and contralateral limbs in primary motor cortex. Heming et al., 2019