Monday, February 14, 2005

Neurons to make decision

Optical Imaging of Neuronal Populations During Decision-Making (from Kristan's lab)

Understanding how a neuronal network makes a behavioral decision is one of a major goal in neuroscience. In this paper, Briggman et al. imaged the activity of a population of leech neurons using voltage-sensitive dye when the leech makes decision of swimming vs. crawling. They excited the (reduced) animal repeatedly with identical stimuli that stochastically produce crawling and swimming with roughly equal probabilities. Principal component (PC) analysis showed that the activity patterns of the cell population diverge toward two different region in the PC space earlier than the actual response. They identified neurons contributing highly to the discriminant in a linear-discriminant analysis. Interestingly, modulating voltage of one of the identified cells (cell 208) by an electrode biased the decision-making.