Non-necessary neural activity in the primate cortex

Abstract

AbstractWhen neurophysiologists record neural activity from the brain, they often conclude that neural tuning to task variables indicates a functional role of the brain area studied in task performance. However, it remains unknown how reliably such correlations indicate a functional role. To answer this question, we chronically recorded neural activity in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys during the performance of four cognitive tasks. Previous studies had demonstrated that only one of those tasks causally depends on the recorded area; the other three tasks are not impaired by lesions of this area. We found that the prevalence and strength of single neuron and ensemble tuning were equivalently high across all four tasks. This suggests that non-necessary cognitive signals are prevalent in the cerebral cortex of primates during task performance, challenging one of the fundamental assumptions of cognitive neurophysiology.One-Sentence SummaryTremblay, Testard and colleagues show that inferring a brain area’s function from neural recordings during task performance is problematic.