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4 Publications

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    12/09/21 | Bidirectional synaptic plasticity rapidly modifies hippocampal representations.
    Milstein AD, Li Y, Bittner KC, Grienberger C, Soltesz I, Magee JC, Romani S
    eLife. 2021 Dec 09;10:. doi: 10.7554/eLife.73046

    Learning requires neural adaptations thought to be mediated by activity-dependent synaptic plasticity. A relatively non-standard form of synaptic plasticity driven by dendritic calcium spikes, or plateau potentials, has been reported to underlie place field formation in rodent hippocampal CA1 neurons. Here we found that this behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP) can also reshape existing place fields via bidirectional synaptic weight changes that depend on the temporal proximity of plateau potentials to pre-existing place fields. When evoked near an existing place field, plateau potentials induced less synaptic potentiation and more depression, suggesting BTSP might depend inversely on postsynaptic activation. However, manipulations of place cell membrane potential and computational modeling indicated that this anti-correlation actually results from a dependence on current synaptic weight such that weak inputs potentiate and strong inputs depress. A network model implementing this bidirectional synaptic learning rule suggested that BTSP enables population activity, rather than pairwise neuronal correlations, to drive neural adaptations to experience.

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    12/06/21 | Non-preferred contrast responses in the Drosophila motion pathways reveal a receptive field structure that explains a common visual illusion.
    Gruntman E, Reimers P, Romani S, Reiser MB
    Current Biology. 2021 Dec 06;31(23):5286. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.072

    Diverse sensory systems, from audition to thermosensation, feature a separation of inputs into ON (increments) and OFF (decrements) signals. In the Drosophila visual system, separate ON and OFF pathways compute the direction of motion, yet anatomical and functional studies have identified some crosstalk between these channels. We used this well-studied circuit to ask whether the motion computation depends on ON-OFF pathway crosstalk. Using whole-cell electrophysiology, we recorded visual responses of T4 (ON) and T5 (OFF) cells, mapped their composite ON-OFF receptive fields, and found that they share a similar spatiotemporal structure. We fit a biophysical model to these receptive fields that accurately predicts directionally selective T4 and T5 responses to both ON and OFF moving stimuli. This model also provides a detailed mechanistic explanation for the directional preference inversion in response to the prominent reverse-phi illusion. Finally, we used the steering responses of tethered flying flies to validate the model's predicted effects of varying stimulus parameters on the behavioral turning inversion.

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    Romani LabSvoboda Lab
    06/01/21 | Attractor dynamics gate cortical information flow during decision-making.
    Finkelstein A, Fontolan L, Economo MN, Li N, Romani S, Svoboda K
    Nature Neuroscience. 2021 Jun 1;24(6):843-50. doi: 10.1038/s41593-021-00840-6

    Decisions are held in memory until enacted, which makes them potentially vulnerable to distracting sensory input. Gating of information flow from sensory to motor areas could protect memory from interference during decision-making, but the underlying network mechanisms are not understood. Here, we trained mice to detect optogenetic stimulation of the somatosensory cortex, with a delay separating sensation and action. During the delay, distracting stimuli lost influence on behavior over time, even though distractor-evoked neural activity percolated through the cortex without attenuation. Instead, choice-encoding activity in the motor cortex became progressively less sensitive to the impact of distractors. Reverse engineering of neural networks trained to reproduce motor cortex activity revealed that the reduction in sensitivity to distractors was caused by a growing separation in the neural activity space between attractors that encode alternative decisions. Our results show that communication between brain regions can be gated via attractor dynamics, which control the degree of commitment to an action.

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    03/01/21 | Mapping Low-Dimensional Dynamics to High-Dimensional Neural Activity: A Derivation of the Ring Model from the Neural Engineering Framework.
    Barak O, Romani S
    Neural Computation. 2021 Mar 01;33(3):827-52. doi: 10.1162/neco_a_01361

    Empirical estimates of the dimensionality of neural population activity are often much lower than the population size. Similar phenomena are also observed in trained and designed neural network models. These experimental and computational results suggest that mapping low-dimensional dynamics to high-dimensional neural space is a common feature of cortical computation. Despite the ubiquity of this observation, the constraints arising from such mapping are poorly understood. Here we consider a specific example of mapping low-dimensional dynamics to high-dimensional neural activity-the neural engineering framework. We analytically solve the framework for the classic ring model-a neural network encoding a static or dynamic angular variable. Our results provide a complete characterization of the success and failure modes for this model. Based on similarities between this and other frameworks, we speculate that these results could apply to more general scenarios.

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