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Updated: Nov 8, 2025

Author Spotlight: Deciphering Neural Circuit Formation from Two-Photon Microscopy and Single Neuron Imaging
Published on: November 21, 2023
Spontaneous and evoked activity patterns diverge over development
Lilach Avitan1,2, Zac Pujic1, Jan Mölter1,3
1Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
Abstract:
The immature brain is highly spontaneously active. Over development this activity must be integrated with emerging patterns of stimulus-evoked activity, but little is known about how this occurs. Here we investigated this question by recording spontaneous and evoked neural activity in the larval zebrafish tectum from 4 to 15 days post-fertilisation. Correlations within spontaneous and evoked activity epochs were comparable over development, and their neural assemblies refined in similar ways. However, both the similarity between evoked and spontaneous assemblies, and also the geometric distance between spontaneous and evoked patterns, decreased over development. At all stages of development, evoked activity was of higher dimension than spontaneous activity. Thus, spontaneous and evoked activity do not converge over development in this system, and these results do not support the hypothesis that spontaneous activity evolves to form a Bayesian prior for evoked activity.
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