🚧 This project is under active development. Stay tuned for updates! 🚧
A long-standing debate in neuroscience concerns whether individual neurons are organized into functionally distinct populations that encode information differently (categorical representations) and the implications for neural computation. Here, we systematically analyzed how cortical neurons encode cognitive, sensory, and movement variables across 43 cortical regions during a complex task (14,000+ units from the International Brain Laboratory public Brainwide Map data set [2]) and studied how these properties change across the sensory-cognitive cortical hierarchy [3].
We found that the structure of the neural code was scale-dependent: on a whole-cortex scale, neural selectivity was categorical and organized across regions in a way that reflected their anatomical connectivity. However, within individual regions, categorical representations were rare and limited to primary sensory areas. Remarkably, the degree of categorical clustering of neural selectivity was inversely correlated to the dimensionality of neural representations, suggesting a link between single-neuron selectivity and computational properties of population codes that we explained in a mathematical model.
Check out the folder of example_selectivity for a complete example of performing the clustering analysis in the variable selectivity space, using the single neuron coefficients of an encoding model that is trained to predict the neural responses using the relevant task variables.
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In case you have any questions, please get in touch with me: shuqi.wang@epfl.ch
[1] Posani, L., Wang, S., Muscinelli, S. P., Paninski, L., & Fusi, S. (2025). Rarely categorical, always high-dimensional: how the neural code changes along the cortical hierarchy. bioRxiv, 2024-11.
[2] International Brain Laboratory, Benson, B., Benson, J., Birman, D., Bonacchi, N., Bougrova, K., ... & Witten, I. B. (2023). A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour. biorxiv, 2023-07.
[3] Harris, J. A., Mihalas, S., Hirokawa, K. E., Whitesell, J. D., Choi, H., Bernard, A., ... & Zeng, H. (2019). Hierarchical organization of cortical and thalamic connectivity. Nature, 575(7781), 195-202.