1 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724, USA, 2 Instituto de Fisiología Celular, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apartado Postal 70-253, C.P. 04510 México, D.F. México
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Abstract |
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Introduction |
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One way in which persistent stimulus-dependent activity can represent information is in what has been termed a monotonic firing rate code. Romo et al. (1999) trained macaques to perform a task that required remembering a scalar parameter that fell within a finite range (see Fig. 1). In this task, subjects must remember the frequency of a vibrotactile mechanical stimulus during a delay period several seconds long. Romo et al. found neurons in prefrontal cortex (PFC) that fired persistently during the delay period, with firing rates that either continually increased as the frequency of the stimulus held in memory increased (positive monotonic neurons; see Fig. 2), or continually decreased as the stimulus frequency increased (negative monotonic neurons). If the monotonic functions relating stimulus and firing rate of each neuron are smooth and broad, as in the example of Figure 2, then all cues in the range of cues used in the experiment drive all participating neurons to appreciable firing rates. Thus, the key factor in determining the identity of the stimulus held in memory is not which neurons are firing above their spontaneous rate, but how much the neurons are firing. Here we will describe the smoothness properties of the monotonic code found by Romo et al. (1999)
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The monotonic encoding we focus on here is not specific to the vibrotactile discrimination task. The neural activity necessary to drive eye muscles so as to keep the eyes still while away from their natural equilibrium position can be thought of as representing a memory of eye position (Lopez-Barneo et al., 1982; Cannon et al., 1983
; Seung, 1996
). Studies in goldfish have revealed the presence of neurons with firing rates that are persistent during eye fixations and that depend monotonically on eye position (Aksay et al., 2000
, 2001). Although very different in many respects, the vibrotactile task (which is trained) and the eye position task (which is part of natural behavior) are similar in that both of them require remembering a scalar parameter that falls within a finite range. In both tasks, there is a well-defined ordinal relationship between possible sensory stimuli to be held in memory (if stimulus A < stimulus B and B < C, then A < C). We speculate that other tasks that satisfy these conditions would also give rise to a monotonic delay period encoding (Romo et al., 1999
).
Models for monotonic persistent activity have recently been developed, focusing on eye position behavior (Seung et al., 2000; Koulakov et al., 2002
) and on vibrotactile frequency memorization (Miller et al., 2003
). In the case of vibrotactile frequency, positive monotonic neurons coexist and are interspersed in the same hemisphere with negative monotonic neurons. Both this aspect and the time-dependence of many responses are considered in the model of Miller et al.
Part of the results presented here were described previously in shorter form (Romo et al., 1999). In the present paper, we present additional data (from a further monkey, performing the variant of the task shown in Fig. 1b), as well as additional and more extensive analysis of the data.
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Materials and Methods |
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Several different stimulus sets were used, but the majority of recordings were carried out using the two sets illustrated in Figure 1c,d. To avoid variations in task difficulty, large differences between f2 and f1, compared to the monkeys psychophysical threshold, were used in these stimulus sets. Stimulus set A was used with monkeys 13 (trained on task variant of Fig. 1a); stimulus set B was used with monkeys 45 (monkey 4 trained on task variant of Figure 1a, monkey 5 trained on task variant of Fig. 1b). Stimulus set B was specifically designed so that no f1 value allowed subjects to predict the appropriate motor response. Results across all stimulus sets were similar.
Single neuronal activity was recorded through seven independently movable microelectrodes (23 M) (Romo et al., 1999
; Salinas et al., 2000
; Hernández et al., 2002
), separated from each other by 500 µm and inserted in parallel into the inferior convexity of the PFC of the left hemisphere of four monkeys and of the right hemisphere in three monkeys. Results from both right and left PFCs were similar and data have been collapsed across them. Recordings sites changed from session to session. After advancing the electrodes into cortex, window discriminators were used to isolate one neuron per electrode while the monkeys performed the task. Typically, one or two neurons judged to be task-dependent, either because of responses that seemed correlated in time with task events or because of responses that seemed dependent on values of the vibrotactile stimuli, would be thus identified. Signals from the electrodes used to record these neurons would receive the focus of the experimenters attention during subsequent recording of a full block of trials of a stimulus set (typically 10 repeats per f1/f2 pair of stimulus sets shown in Fig. 1c,d). After recording a full set, all seven electrodes would be advanced further into cortex to search for further neurons; 1162 neurons were recorded in this manner. For the analysis of Figure 6, signals from electrodes that had not been the focus of attention during recording were used and treated as if they came from single neurons, provided they passed all three of the following tests: (i) the fraction of interspike intervals <1.5 ms was <2%; (ii) overall firing rate remained stable throughout the recording of the full set (trials were grouped into units of 10 consecutive trials each, average firing rate eing deemed not different across units if an analysis of variance (ANOVA) test gave P > 0.1); and (iii) firing rate was never >80 Hz and, when averaged over f1 stimuli and the entire delay period, not <2 Hz. This led to a further 217 recordings being identified as individual units, for a grand total of 1379 recordings treated as originating from individual neurons. Of of these, 557 (40%) were found to have a significantly monotonic f1-dependent firing rate during the delay period.
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Data Analysis
Single-neuron spike trains were convolved with Gaussian kernels to obtain time-dependent spike density functions for each trial. Kernels were corrected for edge effects and stimulus periods densities were computed separately from densities of other periods; stimulus periods kernel = 50 ms, other periods
= 150 ms: thus, the effective time scale of the delay period analysis was
300600 ms. Edge correction was carried out by smoothing the firing rate function f(t) for each period with edges at T0 and T1 using
where s(t) is the smoothed function and h(t) is the smoothing Gaussian. A time-dependent spike rate mean and a time-dependent spike rate standard error of the mean were computed from the set of density functions for each base stimulus condition. At each point in time, we computed the best linear fit of mean response as a function of base stimulus frequency; the significance of the slope of the linear fit being different from zero was then computed from the standard errors (Ross, 1987; Press et al., 1992
). We also computed the
2-based goodness-of-fit probability Q of both a linear (2 degrees of freedom) and a sigmoidal (4 degrees of freedom) fit to the data (Press et al., 1992
). Times where the linear regression slope was significantly different from zero (P < 0.01) and either or both of the linear and sigmoidal fits were acceptable (Q > 0.05) were marked as significantly monotonic. Sigmoidal fits can replicate linear fits and, thus, the optimal sigmoidal fit always has a
2 value smaller than or equal to that of the optimal linear fit. But Q is a function of both
2 and the number of degrees of freedom and, for a given value of
2, is higher for the fit with the smaller number of degrees of freedom (Press et al., 1992
). Significantly monotonic times were thus marked as either linear or sigmoidal, according to which fit had the higher Q. A similar classification procedure was followed for firing rates averaged over the entire delay period (Fig. 3). To evaluate the net effect of our marking methods, we took 318 neurons that had at least one delay period moment marked as significantly monotonic and shuffled the base frequency labels among trials of each neuron. Upon reanalysis, only 13 of the shuffled neurons had one or more moments during the delay period marked as significantly monotonic. Thus, the net probability of marking a neuron as monotonic by chance was
P = 13/318
0.04.
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Results |
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Smoothness of Monotonic Encoding
The smooth monotonic encoding described here is different to two other types of delay period encoding that have been found. The first is similar to a labelled-line code: neurons that fire persistently during the delay period do so maximally for only one or a few of the possible cues and different neurons respond preferentially to different cues (Fuster, 1973; Funahashi et al., 1989
, 1990; Miller et al., 1993
, 1996; Fuster et al., 2000
). Each neuron may therefore be labelled as having a particular preferred cue and this label is a key component to decoding the responses of the neuronal population. The neurons may fire appreciably, if less than maximally, for a relatively broad range of cues, leading to such codes being often thought of in terms of Gaussian population coding (Deneve et al., 2001
). But because of the key role played by the neurons labels, we may think of this code as similar to a labelled-line code. Note that in the well-studied task of remembering one of a set of spatial positions arranged in a ring (Gnadt and Andersen, 1988
; Funahashi et al., 1989
, 1990), there is no well-defined ordinal relationship between positions in the ring and thus we would not expect monotonic encoding. Another type of encoding with which monotonic encoding should be contrasted is temporal encoding. In this type of code, it is the temporal properties of the neural activity (e.g. the presence or absence of oscillations within a particular frequency band), rather than firing rate per se, that encode the memory of the stimulus (Pesaran et al., 2002
). Temporal encoding has been observed coexisting with labelled-line firing rate encoding (Pesaran et al., 2002
). Whether one causes the other is not yet clear.
We selected those neurons that were classified as persistent [see Materials and Methods; n = 126 out of 557 (23%) delay period stimulus-dependent neurons] and fit their firing rates, averaged over the whole delay period, as either linear (2 degrees of freedom) or sigmoidal (4 degrees of freedom) functions of f1. Taking into account both the number of degrees of freedom and the quality of the fit, neurons were classified as either linear or sigmoidal (see Materials and Methods). Fifty-four (43% of 126) persistent neurons were classified as linear. By definition, the f1 firing rate function of linear neurons is smooth. Figure 3a shows a histogram of the slopes found for these neurons. The absolute value of the slope ranged from 0.15 to 0.9 spikes/s per pulses/s, with a median value of 0.32. Thus, for a typical linear persistent neuron, a change in f1 from 10 to 34 pulses/s (full range used in the experiments) led to a change in the delay period firing rate of 8 spikes/s. Overall median firing rate during the delay period, compiled over all stimuli and all linear persistent neurons, was 16 spikes/s.
Seventy-two (57% 0of 126) persistent neurons were classified as having a sigmoidal delay period tuning. The delay period firing rates of these neurons were fit with a function of the form a * tanh[ß(f1 )] + c. The hyperbolic tangent function, tanh(x), is roughly linear for x within [1, 1] and begins to saturate at higher or lower values. Thus, high values of ß indicate a function that approximates a sharp (non-smooth) step function; conversely, very low values of ß approximate smooth, linear tuning. The
parameter indicates the f1 centerpoint of the sigmoidal function. Figure 3b shows a scatterplot of ß versus
fit values, with one data point per sigmoidal persistent neuron. The centerpoints
cluster around the midpoint of the f1 range used (median value of
= 23 pulses/s). The values of ß were close to zero, with a median absolute value of 0.15. Thus, the typical sigmoidal persistent neuron had fairly smooth tuning, being linear over a range of
13 pulses/s (
2/0.15), an appreciable part of the range used in the experiments. The median firing rate change for sigmoidal persistent neurons, for f1 changing from 10 to 34 pulses/s, was 10 spikes/s. The overall median firing rate of these neurons was 18 spikes/s.
Some outliers from the distribution shown in Figure 3b were found. Values of far from 22 generally corresponded to sigmoidal fits similar to that shown in the inset of the upper left of Figure 3b, for which the slightly curved, but nevertheless smooth, shape is fit better by the corner of a soft sigmoid than by a straight line. Eleven neurons had a
value outside the range shown in the graph. All of these 11 neurons had very small ß values (0.02 < |ß| < 0.11), indicating a high degree of smoothness. Nine neurons had sigmoidal fits with a value of |ß| > 1. These were fits similar to that shown in the inset at the top right of Figure 3b; although the best-fitting sigmoid was a sharp step function, for all nine of these neurons the step function had a data point located at the midpoint of its high slope portion, indicating that large changes in firing rate required a change of more than the 4 pulses/sc that typically separated values of f1 used (see Fig. 1c,d).
For large values of |ß|, the centerpoint represents the value of f1 at which the neurons response changes abruptly from a low to a high firing rate. An alternative to the smooth encoding we have focused on here would be to represent f1 by the number of neurons that are firing above such an abrupt threshold. However, for small values of |ß|, even though the fits centerpoint
remains well-defined, there is no clear threshold value at which the firing rate changes abruptly (see, for example, the insets at top left, lower left and lower right in Fig. 3b). Threshold-based encoding is thus not well-defined for small |ß|. The inset at the lower center of Figure 3b shows a relatively smooth fit which has a ß value of 0.25. We conservatively took 0.25 as the minimum |ß| for which a threshold-based encoding could be considered. Including all outliers, only 22 neurons (31% of 77 sigmoidal neurons, only 17% of all 126 persistent neurons) had |ß| > 0.25, indicating that a strong majority of neurons encoded f1 in a smooth monotonic fashion. We touch again on this issue in the Choice Probability and Discussion sections below.
We re-performed the smoothness analysis on the firing rates of persistent neurons, but now examining separately each of the three non-overlapping 1 s long segments of time within the delay period (e.g. the three right-hand panels of Fig. 2b). Distributions and results of linear and sigmoidal fits of firing rates as a function of f1, for the individual 1 s long segments, were similar to those shown in Figure 3 (data not shown). Thus, the overall picture that emerged was that the monotonic stimulus-dependence of delay period firing rates of persistent neurons was a smooth function of f1, with many of the f1 firing rate mappings best fit by straight lines and with sigmoidal fits having shallow slopes and centerpoints clustered near 22 pulses/s.
Lack of Non-monotonic Encoding
Was monotonic encoding the only type of f1-dependence displayed by PFC neuron firing rates during the delay period? To search for f1 stimulus-dependent firing rates that were not necessarily monotonic functions of f1 during the delay period, we grouped trials according to the value of f1 and tested whether there was any significant difference between responses to different f1 values by using a one-way ANOVA test (P < 0.05). The ANOVA test does not assume monotonicity or any other type of functional form. We took records of neurons studied with 3 s long delay periods and divided the delay period into three non-overlapping seconds (three rightmost panels of Fig. 2b). For each of these 3 s, we asked first whether firing rates were a monotonic function of f1 (see Materials and Methods) and, secondly, whether the ANOVA test indicated an f1-dependence. Records were marked as monotonic or non-monotonic according to the result of the monotonic test (P < 0.05). Records marked as non-monotonic were further marked as significantly f1-dependent, in a non-monotonic manner, if the ANOVA test was positive (P < 0.05). Out of all non-monotonic records, only 3.5% were marked as f1-dependent by the ANOVA test. At P < 0.05, this is comparable to the number that would be expected purely by chance. We thus concluded that, within the resolution afforded us by the finite number of f1 values used and the finite number of trials recorded per condition (typically 10 trials per f1/f2 pair), there was no significantly detectable non-monotonic encoding of f1 in the firing rates of prefrontal cortex neurons.
Time-varying f1-dependence
Neurons studied with a 3 s long delay period were classified into different groups according to the portion of the delay period during which their firing rates were significantly f1 stimulus-dependent (Fig. 4; see Materials and Methods). This classification is based on stimulus-dependence, not on overall temporal trends in firing rate. To emphasize this point, the neurons chosen for illustration in Figure 4ac were all specifically chosen as neurons that, after averaging across f1 stimuli, show no significant temporal trends in their delay period firing rate. Monkeys 14 performed the task as shown in Figure 1a, with no enforced delay between the end of stimulus f2 and the start of the motor response. From these four monkeys, 345 neurons that were stimulus-dependent during the delay period were studied with a 3 s long delay period. Of these, 29% (n = 101; Fig. 4a) were classified as late, 26% (n = 90; Fig. 4b) were classified as persistent, and 35% (n = 121; Fig. 4c) were classified as early. The remainder could not be classified within any of these three broad groups.
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Choice Probability Analysis
If the monotonic firing rate encoding we have described is the neuronal basis for representing the short-term memory of f1 during the task, then trial-by-trial variations in firing rates of monotonic neurons should be accompanied by correlated trial-by-trial variations in performance. For example, if on a particular f1 = 22 pulses/s trial a positive monotonic neuron fired more strongly than average, we would expect that on that trial the monkey would remember f1 as having been slightly higher than 22 pulses/s. This effect on memory would be revealed by a bias, on such trials, for the monkey to respond by pressing the f1 > f2 button rather than the f1 < f2 button.
We quantified the correlation between firing rate and behavior by taking trials for each particular f1/f2 stimulus pair and dividing them into two sets, those in which the monkey finished by pressing the f1 > f2 button and those in which the monkey finished by pressing the f1 < f2 button. We then asked, for each neuron, whether the neuronal responses of the two sets of trials were similar or different from each other. With the f1 and f2 stimuli held fixed, it is only the monkeys pushbutton choice that distinguishes the two sets of trials from each other. (One of the sets will be composed of error trials, while the other will be composed of correct trials.) When the difference between the two sets of responses is evaluated by computing a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve area, this type of analysis is termed choice probability analysis (Green and Swets, 1966; Britten et al., 1996
). Here, a choice probability >0.5 indicates that the sign of the separation between the two sets of responses is the same as predicted by whether, based on correct trials only, the neuron was positive or negative monotonic (as in the f1 = 22 pulses/s example of the paragraph above). A choice probability of 1 (its maximum value) further indicates that the distributions of the two sets of responses are completely non-overlapping; a choice probability of 0.5 indicates that the distributions of the two sets of responses overlap very closely; and a choice probability <0.5 indicates that the sign of the difference between the two distributions is opposite to that predicted by their tuning.
We performed this analysis for each individual f1/f2 stimulus pair for each neuron and then averaged across f1/f2 pairs and across each of the neuronal populations of early, persistent and late neurons. The results are shown in Figure 5. The average choice probability (ACP) of persistent neurons is significantly higher than 0.5, even during the f1 stimulus period, grows as the delay period unfolds and is higher than that of any other type of neuron throughout the entire delay period. The ACP of early neurons is significantly higher than 0.5 only during the beginning of the delay period, while the ACP of late neurons becomes significantly higher than 0.5 only towards the end of the delay period. This is consistent with the separately defined temporal properties of each groups f1-dependence.
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One of the differences between the analysis of Figure 5 and previous choice probability analysis of PFC neuron responses during delayed visuomotor tasks (Kim and Shadlen, 1999; Constantinidis et al., 2001
) is that here the analysis is performed on responses from a delay period that occurs before the monkey can decide on its motor response to the trial. The analysis of Figure 5 therefore more closely reflects a purely memory-based correlation of firing rates with behavior, as opposed to a potential mix of memory and decision effects (Constantinidis et al., 2001
). When stimulus f2 is finally presented and the monkey makes its choice, ACP values of responses in both PFC and in secondary somatosensory cortex rise sharply, reaching values as high as 0.81, much higher than any value shown in Figure 5 (Romo et al., 2002
; Romo et al., unpublished results).
Time-dependent Average Firing Rates
To study overall temporal trends during the delay period, we averaged firing rates across f1 stimuli and computed for each neuron the firing rate during each of the three non-overlapping seconds of the delay period (three right-hand panels of Fig. 2b). We then tested for differences in firing rate across these three successive seconds. A very large proportion of all neurons thus tested (560 of 777, 72%) were found to have a significant time-dependence in their firing rates during the delay period (one-way ANOVA, significance limit a highly conservative P < 0.001 for each neuron; P-value confirmed in a shuffle test that randomly permuted data between the three different seconds). Of the 777 neurons tested, 217 were units recorded from electrodes that during the experiments had been not been judged to carry signals related to the task, either in the timing or in the stimulus-dependence of their responses [see Materials and Methods; the 217 apparently not task-related neurons should not be confused with a different, overlapping set that coincidentally has the same number of members, namely the 217 neurons (777 560) that did not have significantly time-dependent responses]. In contrast to most of the recorded neurons, the apparently non-task-related subset of the population had an explicit selection bias against having f1-dependent firing rates. Yet a high proportion of neurons of this subpopulation also had significantly time-dependent firing rates (112/217, 52%). This suggests that firing rates that vary systematically with time as the delay period unfolds are very common in the PFC. This also shows that many of the 217 neurons that had no f1-dependence nevertheless did have responses related to the task, albeit to timing aspects of the task.
A large variety of time-dependent patterns in firing rate were found. To enable us to visualize this variety, we computed two numbers for each neuron: (i) the difference in average firing rates between the middle and the first second of the delay period (do firing rates start the delay period by rising or falling?); and (ii) the difference in average firing rates between the last and the middle second of the delay period (do firing rates end the delay period by rising or falling?). To facilitate comparison across neurons, we then normalized both of the computed numbers by the neurons firing rate, averaged over the entirety of the delay period. The two normalized numbers are plotted against each other, for the 560 significantly time-dependent neurons, in Figure 6. Insets in this figure show examples of peristimulus time histograms (PSTHs) for individual neurons. We emphasize that the firing rates and PSTHs in this figure are computed averaged over f1 stimuli: here we are focusing purely on time-dependent, not f1-dependent, effects. For clarity, the 217 non-significantly time-dependent neurons are not shown; they would all cluster near the origin of the graph.
A plurality of neurons had data points in the top right quadrant of Figure 6 (236 neurons, 42%). Neurons corresponding to data points in this quadrant have firing rates that are rising during both the start and the end the delay period. The quadrant with the next highest number of data points (171 neurons, 31%) is the lower left quadrant, where neurons have monotonically decaying firing rates. Note that in both the upper right and lower left quadrants there are many data points far from the cardinal axes. For such neurons, the decay (or rise) in firing rates occurs from the beginning through to the end of the delay period. The upper left quadrant, in which a substantial number of neurons (119, 21%) have their data points, indicates falling followed by rising firing rates. Finally, the odd quadrant out is the lower right quadrant, in which a very small number of neurons (34, 6%) had data points. Neurons with firing rates that at first rise and then fall during the delay period are thus rare. If the data points fell randomly in the different quadrants, 140 ± 10 (mean ± SD) neurons per quadrant would be expected; since all differences in number of neurons between the four quadrants are much greater than 10, the differences are thus highly significant (confirmed by permutation test, P < 0.001).
Of the 126 persistently stimulus-dependent neurons, a remarkably high proportion (113, 90%) had significantly time-varying firing rates (P < 0.001 for each neuron). This fraction is higher even than the fraction in the general population (which was 72%, as indicated above). We speculated that the origin of this result with persistent neurons could lie in temporal variations occurring at the very beginning of the delay period, when the memory signal may be in the course of being established, or at the very end of the delay period, when anticipation of the end of the delay period may lead to changes in firing rates. We therefore repeated the analysis of time-dependency of persistent neurons, but after having excluded both the first 500 and the last 500 ms of the delay period from consideration. This analysis, focusing on the central 2 s of the delay period, still resulted in a very high fraction of the persistent neurons (84 of 126, 67%) being marked as having significantly time-dependent firing rates (again, P < 0.001 for each neuron). These results indicate that neurons with steady persistent firing rates, such as the example neuron shown in Figure 4b, are markedly in the minority. Instead, persistent neurons with time-dependent changes in their firing rates, such as those shown in Figures 2 or 8i, are much more common.
Effect of Changing the Delay Period Length
Are time-dependent firing patterns in the PFC dependent on the length of the delay period, or are they a response due to a fixed dynamics, having a fixed time scale that is independent of the delay period length? Following Kojima and Goldman-Rakic (1982), we had the opportunity, for a small number of neurons (n = 51), of recording from them during a block of trials with a delay period of 6 s, after having recording from them during a standard block of trials with the 3 s long delay period, The monkeys had previously trained on both 3 and 6 s delay periods (although 3 s delay periods were predominantly used). All sets of trials were done in blocks. Thus, one or a few trials with a particular delay period length were sufficient to allow the monkeys to know which delay period length the next trial would most likely have.
Figure 7a shows the spike trains of a late neuron during both the last trials of the 3 s delay period block and the first trials of the 6 s delay period block. During the first few trials of the 6 s block, the neuron responded with a timing similar to its timing during the 3 s block, firing vigorously slightly before the 3 s mark. But as the trials progressed, the response of the neuron adjusted, moving its firing to a much later part of the delay period. Most late neurons in which a similar change in response profile was visible on a trial-to-trial basis adjusted much more rapidly, usually within one or two trials, such as the neuron with responses illustrated in Figure 7b. There was a small but significant tendency for the monkeys to make more mistakes than usual on the first trial of the 6 s blocks (percentage correct on first trials of 6 s blocks, 79%; on second trial, 95%; on all trials subsequent to the first, 93%; P < 0.05 in a permutation test for first trial having lower percentage correct than subsequent trials). No such tendency was found on the first trial of 3 s blocks (percentage correct on first trials of 3 s blocks, 92%; on all trials subsequent to the first, 94%; P > 0.45 for first trial having lower percentage correct than subsequent trials).
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where is a dimensionless scaling factor, s is a temporal shift with units of seconds and T represents the portion of the 6 s delay period that overlaps with the 3 s delay period after scaling and shifting. We then averaged over f1 frequencies, to obtain a total squared error measure E(
, s) = <Ef1(
, s)>f1. The values of
and s that minimized E were defined as the optimal warp and shift.
The optimal warp and shift for each neuron are indicated in the corresponding panels of Figure 8ag. Time shifts are generally small (|s| < 0.31 s), while most values of are close to one-half (|
0.5| < 0.1). This confirms that the transformation of these late neuron responses from the 3 s delay period condition to the 6 s delay period condition is characterized mostly by a time stretch (stretch factor
2), with time shifts being relatively unimportant. For persistent neurons with firing rates that remain relatively constant during the delay period (Fig. 8h), there is no meaningful optimal stretch or shift. But an optimal stretch and shift can be defined for persistent neurons with time-varying firing rates; an example of such a persistent neuron is shown in Figure 8i. Once again, the shift is small (100 ms) and the transform is dominated by stretching.
Many of the late neurons in Figure 8 have low or constant firing rates during the first third of the delay period. The analysis is therefore mostly dependent on dynamics of responses during the final, rather than the earlier, part of the delay period. In contrast to late neurons, early neurons generally have strong dynamics in their responses during the beginning of the delay period (Fig. 6). Five neurons classified as early, based on data from 3 s delay period blocks, were recorded during subsequent 6 s delay period blocks. These recordings allowed us to approach the question of what effect changing the delay period length might have on the early, rather than the late, parts of the delay period. Unlike the late neurons of Figure 8, some of these five early neurons changed their maximum firing rates markedly between the two delay period conditions. Some of them also changed the overall shape of their PSTHs. For these early neurons, matching PSTHs from the two conditions was thus a less straightforward proposition than for the late neurons. We addressed this problem in two ways. First, we focused on early parts of the response by requiring the match to be based only on the first second of the 3 s delay period responses; PSTH shapes were roughly similar in the two conditions for this part of the response. Secondly, we focused only on the PSTH shapes, not their maxima or minima, by allowing shifting and stretching of the firing rate axis, in addition to the time axis when performing the match. Figure 9 shows overlaid PSTHs, averaged over f1 stimuli, from the 6 s delay period condition and, after stretching and shifting, from the 3 s delay period condition. Good matches in the shapes of the early parts of the responses are obtained. Similarly to the late neurons of Figure 8, shifts in the time axis are small (|s| < 0.2 s). In contrast to the late neurons, however, the best shape matches were obtained with time-stretch factors that are close to 1, instead of close to a half (|
1| < 0.17).
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Discussion |
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Different neurons were found to have f1-dependent firing rates during different portions of the delay (Fig. 4). Most neurons with f1-dependent delay period firing rates could be described as belonging to one of three types: early neurons (31%), which had f1-dependent firing rates during the early, but not the late, part of the delay period; persistent neurons (24%), which had f1-dependent firing rates throughout the delay period; and late neurons (33%), which had f1-dependent firing rates during the late, but not the early, part of the delay period. This classification is not intended to describe three widely separate groups, but is merely an aid in characterizing the variety of neurons found. Neurons that had f1-dependence only during the middle portion of the delay period were rare; neurons that had f1-dependence only during the beginning and end, but not the middle, of the delay period, were also rare.
Neurons with f1-dependent delay period activity are also found in brain areas other than the PFC. In particular, secondary somatosensory cortex (area S2; Salinas et al., 2000) contains neurons that have early delay period f1-dependence. No persistent neurons are found in area S2 (Romo et al., 2002
). Early, persistent and late neurons are all found in medial premotor cortex (MPC), although late neurons predominate in the MPC (Hernández et al., 2002
). The similarity between MPC and PFC during the delay period of the vibrotactile task may be analogous to the similarity between lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) and PFC in a delayed saccade visuomotor task (Chafee and Goldman-Rakic, 1998
), although in the vibrotactile task persistent neurons are more easily found in PFC than in MPC. In contrast to all of these areas, no delay period f1-dependent activity was found in S1, the primary somatosensory cortex (Salinas et al., 2000
).
Supporting a role for monotonic encoding as the neural substrate of working memory in the vibrotactile discrimination task, the firing rates of monotonic neurons were found to correlate with the monkeys behavior in a manner predicted by their stimulus-dependence (Fig. 5). That is, for positive monotonic neurons, trials with above-average firing rates resulted in a bias in favor of monkeys pressing the f1 > f2 button rather than the f1 < f2 button, consistent with the monkeys remembering f1 as higher than it actually was. The converse was true for negative monotonic neurons. The portions of the delay period during which this correlation was detected depended on the portions of the delay period during which the neurons monotonically encoded f1: for early neurons, the correlation was present only during the early part of the delay period; for late neurons only at the end of the delay period; and for persistent neurons, it was present throughout. These results are unlikely to be due to modulations in arousal or attentional state during the delay period: such modulations would lead to opposite results for trials in which f2 > f1 compared to trials in which f2 < f1, and no such difference between these two groups of trials was observed (comparison data not shown).
The gradual increase in choice probability seen in Figure 5 is consistent with a memory representation of f1 that is gradually degrading, with noise that accumulates during the delay period. In such a scenario, the later moments of the delay period would have the representation of f1 most highly correlated with the representation actually present when the memory is required for the task (that is, during presentation of f2, immediately after the delay period). The later moments of the delay period would thus have the neuronal responses most highly correlated with the monkeys choice, while neuronal responses from the early part of the delay period, while still correlated with the monkeys choice, would be less strongly correlated, as seen in Figure 5.
The monotonic encoding described here is smooth, in the sense that changes in f1 of a magnitude detectable by the monkey (24 Hz for the range of f1 stimuli used; Hernández et al., 1997) are encoded by gradual changes in the firing rates of monotonic neurons. Of persistent neurons, 43% had firing rates that were a linear function of f1 (Fig. 3a); the remaining 57% had firing rates that were well fit by sigmoidal functions of f1 (firing rate a * tanh [ß(f1
)] + c; Fig. 3b) Sixty-nine per cent of the sigmoidal neurons were fit by very gradual, smooth functions of f1 (|ß| < 0.25). Since there is no single preferred f1 stimulus in a smooth monotonic code, it is fundamentally different from a code based on labelled lines.
Do our data support an f1 encoding scheme different to smooth monotonic encoding? One possibility would be to encode f1 through the identity of sigmoidal neurons firing above their centerpoints the distribution of centerpoints
for the population of sigmoidal neurons was found to be broad enough to span most of the range of f1 values used in the experiment. However, only 17% of all persistent neurons were fit by sigmoids with |ß| > 0.25. This is a conservative minimum value of |ß| for which the sigmoid is sharp enough that
, the f1 centerpoint of the fit, can be reasonably interpreted as a clear threshold f1 value, dividing low from high firing rate responses. It seems unlikely that f1 would be preferentially encoded by such a small fraction of neurons. Furthermore, such an encoding would predict that high |ß| neurons would have a higher correlation with behavior than other neurons, but no such difference was found. Alternatively, a sharp threshold could be part of the decoding procedure rather than the encoding firing rates. For example, f1 could be encoded by the identity of neurons firing above 16 spikes/s, regardless of whether these neurons are linear, smooth sigmoidal neurons, or otherwise. We cannot conclusively rule out such a possibility. However, this decoding threshold-based scenario would suggest that, for linear neurons, high choice probability values would be found for only one or two f1 values (those bordering on the decoding threshold), while other f1 values would be less tighly linked with behavior and would have lower choice probability values. No such difference was found, once again suggesting smooth monotonic encoding as a more likely option.
Our results on monotonic encoding (Romo et al., 1999; present paper) apparently contrast with a recent study of short-term memory encoding of numerosity (Nieder et al., 2002
; Nieder and Miller, 2003
), in which Gaussian-shaped tuning curves for numerosity were found in the PFC, suggesting a labelled-line based population code. However, numerosity was explicitly chosen for that study as being highly abstracted from any sensory representation and composed of well-defined discrete steps (the natural numbers), in contrast to the sensory continuum of vibrotactile frequency used here. The two tasks are thus quite different; this and other differences may explain the contrasting results.
If the late f1-dependence of late neurons were associated with the anticipation of an immediately upcoming f2 stimulus, it might have been expected that the onset of their stimulus-dependence would have a fixed timing relative to the end of the delay period. For example, one might expect a late neuron to start its f1-dependent response 1 s before the end of the delay period, regardless of whether the trial is part of a block of trials with 3 s delay periods or a block with 6 s delay periods. However, we found that late neurons did not shift their response together with the end of the delay period, but instead scaled the timing of their response: their response characteristics evolved half as fast during blocks of 6 s delay period trials as they did during blocks of 3 s delay period trials [Fig. 8; see also Komura et al. (2001)) for a similar response scaling in thalamus]. If time-varying neuronal responses are used to represent time itself, the result is consistent with scalar timing, the equivalent of Webers law in the time domain (Allan, 1979
). The scaling result also suggests that long delay periods cannot be used to temporally isolate persistent neuron f1-dependence from late neuron f1-dependence. Late neurons may thus be as intrinsic a part of a time-dependent memory representation as persistent neurons. It must be emphasized, however, that our results on delay period lengthening are based on an as yet small number of neurons. While strongly suggestive, they can therefore not yet be taken as fully conclusive.
Starting with the first reports of recordings from prefrontal cortex during working memory tasks (Walter, 1964; Fuster, 1973
), it has been known that PFC neuron firing rates often change systematically over the course of delay periods. Separately from temporal effects, the dependency of PFC neuron firing rates on stimuli being held in memory has been considered a very attractive candidate for the neural substrate of working memory. As such, it is this stimulus-dependent aspect, rather than temporal dependency, that has received the greater focus of attention. Current models of persistent activity as a basis for short-term memory assume that the memory is held in a pattern of firing rates in which each neurons firing rate is essentially constant throughout the delay period, except for undesired and minor drifts due to noise (for review, see Wang, 2001
; see also Miller et al., 2003
).
Nevertheless, our experimental observation is that only a very small number of neurons have firing rates that are both f1-dependent and constant during the delay period. Persistent neurons are thought to be fundamental for carrying the memory signal throughout the delay period. Yet an overwhelming fraction of persistent neurons (90%) have firing rates that vary systematically with time during the delay period. Restricting the analysis to a central portion of the delay period necessarily reduces the number of neurons detected as significantly time-dependent (to see this, note that in the limit in which the central portion is reduced to a single instant, there can be no time-dependence). But when the analysis is restricted to the central 2/3 of the delay period, in order to exclude any edge effects associated with the beginning or end of the delay period, a full 67% of persistent neurons are still found to have highly significantly (P < 0.001) time-dependent firing rates.
For 10% (n = 12) of the persistent neurons, the time-dependency analysis indicated a P-value of >0.1 in favor of the null hypothesis of static firing rates (if the analysis is restricted to the central 2 s of the delay period; when the full delay period was considered, only 3%, n = 4, neurons had P > 0.1). This subset of neurons had firing rates that were roughly constant during the delay period. It may be that such a small fraction of f1-dependent neurons is fully responsible for the maintenance of the memory signal and that other neurons merely reflect the activity of these key neurons. However, analysis of error trials showed that time-dependent persistent neurons are as closely correlated with behavior as time-independent persistent neurons (Fig. 5). This suggests that both time-dependent and -independent persistent neurons may play a similar, and equally important, role in determining memory-based behavior.
Rainer and Miller (2002), analyzing PFC responses during an object delayed-matching-to-sample task, have also found strong time-dependence during the delay period and have also emphasized the need to take this into account in computational models of working memory. Our results using a parametric working memory task (Romo et al., 1999
; present paper) support theirs and reinforce concerns regarding the need to incorporate time-dependence into computational modeling studies.
A time-varying memory code might at first seem inconsistent with decoding a memory that should be constant. But the persistence of a memory does not necessarily require static persistence of individual neuron firing rates. It requires a looser condition, namely that some decodable, stimulus-dependent neural property remain invariant during delay periods. Static persistence of firing rates is the simplest and most natural candidate for this, but it is not the only one. A different possibility would have some combination of firing rates that must remain invariant for example, the sum of firing rates of neurons with opposite types of time-dependence. Other possibilities exist, perhaps involving an explicit representation of time by time-dependent neurons (Leon and Shadlen, 2003). If time-dependent delay period responses are the neuronal substrate of working memory, two issues must be addressed. First, how are the time-dependent firing rates of the population decoded in order to represent a memory that, in comparison to the rapidly and strongly varying firing rates, is constant over time spans on the order of seconds? Secondly, what are the mechanisms that constrain time-varying delay period activities to firing rates that would allow the decoding of a persistent memory?
Individually static, stimulus-dependent firing rates are a particularly simple way to represent working memory in a neuronal population and thus deserve a great deal of attention. The optimal strategy to elucidate mechanisms underlying working memory may be first to fully understand mechanisms for such static representations and in some systems, such as the oculomotor integrator in the goldfish, static firing rates may indeed be the basis for representing a static memory (Aksay et al., 2000, 2001). However, the preponderance of time-dependent firing rates in primate prefrontal cortex, as an almost ubiquitous feature of experimentally observed delay period responses, suggests that a full understanding of mechanisms of working memory will require understanding the role of time-dependent representations and the mechanisms behind them.
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R.R.s research was partially supported by an International Research Scholar award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and grants from the Millenium Science Initiative-CONACYT and DGAPA-UNAM. C.D.B. is supported by startup funds from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Address correspondence to Ranulfo Romo, Instituto de Fisiología Celular, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apartado Postal 70-253, C.P. 04510 México, D.F. México. Email: rromo{at}ifc.unam.mx.
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