Abstract
A major shift is happening within neurophysiology: a population doctrine is drawing level with the single-neuron doctrine that has long dominated the field. Population-level ideas have so far had their greatest impact in motor neuroscience, but they hold great promise for resolving open questions in cognition as well. Here, we codify the population doctrine and survey recent work that leverages this view to specifically probe cognition. Our discussion is organized around five core concepts that provide a foundation for population-level thinking: (1) state spaces, (2) manifolds, (3) coding dimensions, (4) subspaces, and (5) dynamics. The work we review illustrates the progress and promise that population-level thinking holds for cognitive neuroscience—for delivering new insight into attention, working memory, decision-making, executive function, learning, and reward processing.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3055-3068 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Neuron |
| Volume | 109 |
| Issue number | 19 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 6 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Discovery Grant RGPIN-2020-05577 to R.B.E.), the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (Junior 1 Salary Award 284309 to R.B.E.), the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (Young Investigator Grant 27298 to R.B.E.), and the National Institutes of Health ( NIDA 038615 and NINDS 118366 to B.Y.H.). We thank Katarzyna Jurewicz, Alex Herman, Vince McGinty, Justin Fine, Pouya Bashivan, Suresh Krishna, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Discovery Grant RGPIN-2020-05577 to R.B.E.), the Fonds de la recherche en sant? du Qu?bec (Junior 1 Salary Award 284309 to R.B.E.), the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (Young Investigator Grant 27298 to R.B.E.), and the National Institutes of Health (NIDA 038615 and NINDS 118366 to B.Y.H.). We thank Katarzyna Jurewicz, Alex Herman, Vince McGinty, Justin Fine, Pouya Bashivan, Suresh Krishna, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. The authors declare no competing interests.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Inc.