Dual coding theory explains biphasic collective computation in neural decision-making

BRYAN DANIELS, Jessica C. Flack, David C. Krakauer

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    27 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    A central question in cognitive neuroscience is how unitary, coherent decisions at the whole organism level can arise from the distributed behavior of a large population of neurons with only partially overlapping information. We address this issue by studying neural spiking behavior recorded from a multielectrode array with 169 channels during a visual motion direction discrimination task. It is well known that in this task there are two distinct phases in neural spiking behavior. Here we show Phase I is a distributed or incompressible phase in which uncertainty about the decision is substantially reduced by pooling information from many cells. Phase II is a redundant or compressible phase in which numerous single cells contain all the information present at the population level in Phase I, such that the firing behavior of a single cell is enough to predict the subject's decision. Using an empirically grounded dynamical modeling framework, we show that in Phase I large cell populations with low redundancy produce a slow timescale of information aggregation through critical slowing down near a symmetry-breaking transition. Our model indicates that increasing collective amplification in Phase II leads naturally to a faster timescale of information pooling and consensus formation. Based on our results and others in the literature, we propose that a general feature of collective computation is a "coding duality" in which there are accumulation and consensus formation processes distinguished by different timescales.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Article number313
    JournalFrontiers in Neuroscience
    Volume11
    Issue numberJUN
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Jun 6 2017

    Keywords

    • Collective computation
    • Critical slowing down
    • Decision tasks

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • General Neuroscience

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