The impact of functional connectivity on task information coding

COEX 

The brain is a complex system with dynamic network changes. Functional connectivity – the measurement of correlated brain activity – is a commonly-used approach to characterizing brain network changes. Despite the wealth of neuroscience studies that have reported reliable state-dependent changes to macroscale brain network organization (Cole et al., 2014), there is no widely accepted theory or understanding of what these functional connectivity changes are for. However, theoretical work in systems neuroscience (at the level of local spiking neurons) has demonstrated that state-dependent neural correlations can be understood from a neural coding framework (Panzeri et al., 2022). Prior theory posits that noise correlations (NC) -- idiosyncratic with functional connectivity -- can be interpreted only if the underlying signal correlation (SC) -- similarity of task tuning (or task co-activations) between pairs of neural units -- is known. Here we investigate whether the theoretical framework used to study neural coding in neuronal spikes can account for macroscale brain network changes (Ito and Murray, 2022).