They are 300 Poisson neurons, where the first 100 encode the whisker stimulus, the next 100 encode the auditory cue and the last 100 act as an extra noise source for our model. Out of the 300 neurons, 60 of them are inhibitory (red). The input neurons project unrestrictedly to the whole RSNN. The baseline firing rate of all input neurons is 5 Hz. The whisker stimulus and auditory cue are encoded with an increase of the firing rate for 10 ms, starting 4 ms after the onset of the actual stimuli.

Simultaneous behavioral and electrophysiological recordings call for new methods to reveal the interactions between neural activity and behavior. A milestone would be an interpretable model of the co-variability of spiking activity and behavior across trials. Here, we model a mouse cortical sensory-motor pathway in a tactile detection task reported by licking with a large recurrent spiking neural network (RSNN), fitted to the recordings via gradient-based optimization. We focus specifically on the difficulty to match the trial-to-trial variability in the data. Our solution relies on optimal transport to define a distance between the distributions of generated and recorded trials. The technique is applied to artificial data and neural recordings covering six cortical areas. We find that the resulting RSNN can generate realistic cortical activity and predict jaw movements across the main modes of trial-to-trial variability. Our analysis also identifies an unexpected mode of variability in the data corresponding to task-irrelevant movements of the mouse.

They live in the same physical world and are intimately familiar with the materials that comprise it, but they would have significant difficulty expressing their values and generalizing the results of an experiment they observetogether. The alchemist would likely learn poorly from examples of a reaction demonstrated by the chemist, not having the right inductive biases for the waytheworldactuallyworks.

Camera-based physiological measurement is a fast growing field of computer vision.