Measures of functional connectivity have played a central role in advancing our understanding of how information is transmitted and processed within the brain. Traditionally, these studies have focused on identifying redundant functional connectivity, which involves determining when activity is similar across different sites or neurons. However, recent research has highlighted the importance of also identifying synergistic connectivity—that is, connectivity that gives rise to information not contained in either site or neuron alone. Here, we measured redundant and synergistic functional connectivity between neurons in the mouse primary auditory cortex during a sound discrimination task. Specifically, we measured directed functional connectivity between neurons simultaneously recorded with calcium imaging. We used Granger Causality as a functional connectivity measure. We then used Partial Information Decomposition to quantify the amount of redundant and synergistic information about the presented sound that is carried by functionally connected or functionally unconnected pairs of neurons. We found that functionally connected pairs present proportionally more redundant information and proportionally less synergistic information about sound than unconnected pairs, suggesting that their functional connectivity is primarily redundant. Further, synergy and redundancy coexisted both when mice made correct or incorrect perceptual discriminations. However, redundancy was much higher (both in absolute terms and in proportion to the total information available in neuron pairs) in correct behavioural choices compared to incorrect ones, whereas synergy was higher in absolute terms but lower in relative terms in correct than in incorrect behavioural choices. Moreover, the proportion of redundancy reliably predicted perceptual discriminations, with the proportion of synergy adding no extra predictive power. These results suggest a crucial contribution of redundancy to correct perceptual discriminations, possibly due to the advantage it offers for information propagation, and also suggest a role of synergy in enhancing information level during correct discriminations.

中文翻译：

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小鼠听觉皮层功能连接神经元之间冗余和协同刺激信息的行为相关性

功能连接的测量在增进我们对大脑内信息如何传输和处理的理解方面发挥了核心作用。传统上，这些研究的重点是识别冗余的功能连接，这涉及确定不同部位或神经元之间的活动何时相似。然而，最近的研究强调了识别协同连接的重要性，即产生不单独包含在站点或神经元中的信息的连接。在这里，我们在声音辨别任务期间测量了小鼠初级听觉皮层神经元之间的冗余和协同功能连接。具体来说，我们测量了用钙成像同时记录的神经元之间的定向功能连接。我们使用格兰杰因果关系作为功能连接性度量。然后，我们使用部分信息分解来量化由功能连接或功能不连接的神经元对所携带的有关所呈现声音的冗余和协同信息的数量。我们发现，与未连接的对相比，功能连接的对呈现出更多的冗余信息和更少的关于声音的协同信息，这表明它们的功能连接主要是冗余的。此外，当小鼠做出正确或不正确的知觉辨别时，协同和冗余同时存在。然而，与不正确的行为选择相比，正确的行为选择的冗余度要高得多（无论是绝对值还是与神经元对中可用的总信息的比例），而正确的行为选择的协同作用绝对值较高，但相对值较低。选择。此外，冗余的比例可靠地预测了知觉歧视，而协同的比例没有增加额外的预测能力。这些结果表明冗余对正确的知觉歧视做出了至关重要的贡献，可能是由于它为信息传播提供了优势，并且还表明了在正确的歧视过程中协同作用在提高信息水平方面的作用。