Title

Mapping encoding and flow of task-relevant information from human MEG recordings in a perceptual decision-making task

Bio

Hamed did his BSc in Electrical engineering in Iran. He then moved to Southampton to do an MSc in applied digital signal processing. This was followed by a research assistant in Professor John Duncan’s lab and then a PhD in Niko Kriegeskorte’s lab in the University of Cambridge. He then did a postdoc with Professor Christopher Summerfield and another postdoc in the Welcome centre for Integrative Neuroimaging both at the University of Oxford. He is now a senior postdoc at the Excellence Department for Neural Information Processing in ZMNH, Hamburg.

Abstract

What are the brain computations used to take appropriate decisions based on the available sensory evidence? Recordings of cortical population activity of subjects performing perceptual discrimination tasks have begun to reveal the distribution across brain areas and frequency bands of neural signals encoding the sensory stimulus or the subject’s decision (Wilming et al., Nat. Commun. 2020), as well as mapping the transmission of activity between selected pairs of visual regions (Bosman et al., Neuron 2012; Ferro et al., PNAS 2021). Despite this progress, a comprehensive and quantitative large-scale mapping of both information encoding and transmission during perceptual decisions is still lacking. Applying information theory to whole-brain MEG recordings, we mapped the encoding and transmission of task-relevant variables across frequency and cortical locations in the human brain during a perceptual discrimination task. This revealed a transformation over time of stimulus information in the gamma band in visual, parietal and cingulate areas into choice signals in the beta and alpha band in downstream areas, mediated by distributed patterns of feedforward gamma stimulus information and feedback alpha-beta choice information transmission.