On Thursday (30.10) we will host Joao Barbosa, PhD. His lecture will be entitled: " Leveraging in silico experiments to unveil distributed computations during flexible behavior". The lecture will take place at 3 p.m. in the CN lecture hall and it will be followed by a get together.

Abstract

Previous work investigating the neural dynamics underlying context-dependent decision making typically analyses a single brain region (typically PFC) or recurrent neural network (RNN). However, evidence suggests that the information required to solve these tasks is distributed across multiple regions. Here, we investigate the neural dynamics across six brain regions of the non-human primate brain where such distributed information has been observed. By examining within-region geometry and dynamics, we identified significant differences not captured by classical decoding analyses. Using surrogate causal perturbation on multi-regional RNNs trained on condition-averaged data, we explored how inter-area interactions shaped these different neural representations. Our findings reveal that even when task-inputs were withheld from frontal regions during testing, these regions still encoded stimulus information and generated response codes, similar to brain data. Conversely, delivering inputs only to frontal regions or blocking across-region interaction lead to network dynamics that represented stimuli, but failed to solve the task and lacked attractor states for current contexts. Gradually disconnecting regions led to an abrupt breakdown of task-solving capabilities, analogous to spatial bifurcation phenomena. Perturbation experiments highlighted the differential contributions of various regions, offering predictive insights for future experimental validation. These results underscore the critical role of inter-regional communication in task performance and provide a framework for understanding distributed neural processing.