Cortical Recruitment Determines Learning Dynamics and Strategy

AbstractSalience is a broad and widely used concept in neuroscience whose neuronal correlates, however, remain elusive. In behavioral conditioning, salience is used to explain various effects, such as stimulus overshadowing, and refers to how fast and strongly a stimulus can be associated with a conditioned event. Here, we show that sounds of diverse quality, but equal intensity and perceptual detectability, can recruit different levels of population activity in mouse auditory cortex. When using these sounds as cues in a Go/NoGo discrimination task, the degree of cortical recruitment matches the salience parameter of a reinforcement learning model used to analyze learning speed. We test an …