Churchland lab

This summer, a number of new papers have come out with data that bear on the role of posterior parietal cortex (PPC) on perceptual decisions. First, a paper by Katz and colleagues shook things up with their new data demonstrating that pharmacological inactivation of primate PPC has little effect on perceptual decisions. These results have been talked about in the community for a while- I will hold off saying too much about them since I wrote a piece about this paper that will come out in a few weeks (Stay tuned- I’ll post a link then). But the short story is that this paper argued that despite strong modulation during perceptual decisions, primate PPC is not a member of the causal circuit for visual motion decisions.

Two papers about rodent PPC, paint a different picture. We shouldn’t be too surprised about this, since although rodent and primate PPC share the same name, they have a number of anatomical and functional differences that mean it isn’t right to think of one as the homologue of the other (in fact, could we just stop using the word, “homologue” altogether?).

The first paper, by Michael Goard and colleagues, measured and manipulated mouse PPC neurons during a visual detection task: the mice were shown a horizontal or vertical grating, then waited through a 3-9 second delay, then reported whether a vertical grating was present by licking a spout. The authors disrupted PPC activity optogenetically. They found that performance declined considerably when the activation took place during the time the grating was visible to the mice. Interestingly, although PPC neurons were highly active during other parts of the trial, the delay and movement periods, for instance, disruption during those times had little effect on performance. This argues that the activity during those periods may reflect signals that are computed elsewhere and fed back to PPC.

 
The second paper is from my lab. Like the Goard paper, we found that performance declined when we stimulated while animals were facing visual stimuli that they had to judge. We mainly focussed on this period, so can’t compare the results with disruption at other times. We did, however, compare disruption on visual vs. auditory trials in the same animal and the same session, and we found that effects were mostly restricted to visual decisions. This fits with the data from the paper above, and also with deficits on a visual memory task reported in mice by Chris Harvey and David Tank.

Beyond the science of our paper, it was also a landmark moment in my lab because it is our first paper not the preprint server, biorxiv! Thebiorxiv was started at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It provides a way for scientists to make their work freely available to the world as they journey through the sometimes long process of academic publishing. I like the idea of making the work available fast, and the fact that it is freely accessible to everyone is important too. I’m excited to be part of this new effort and…  I admit my enthusiasm prompted me to modify the rainbow unicorn of asapbio just a bit…