Poster Session: Using OPM-MEG to study the timecourse of human contrast discrimination.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Biology

Background:

• The International Brain Laboratory (IBL) project aims to map brain-wide information flow in mice during perceptual decision-making.
• Understanding how priors modulate this information flow is crucial for characterizing neural computation.
• Translating IBL paradigms to humans is essential for bridging rodent and human neuroscience.

Purpose of the Study:

• To adapt the IBL 2AFC task for human subjects.
• To investigate human behavioral responses and brain activity using psychophysics and novel neuroimaging (OPM-MEG).
• To compare human and rodent behavioral data and validate OPM-MEG findings against fMRI.

Main Methods:

• Adaptation of a 2-alternative forced choice (2AFC) perceptual decision task for human participants.
• Collection of behavioral data through psychophysical testing.
• Acquisition of neuroimaging data using optically pumped magnetometers-magnetoencephalography (OPM-MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Main Results:

• Human psychophysical responses closely replicated key features of rodent behavior, including the influence of perceptual priors (bias).
• Psychophysical response functions in humans exhibited similar forms and bias dependencies as observed in mice.
• Magnetoencephalography data allowed for time-resolved decoding of visual stimuli, responses, bias, and feedback.
• OPM-MEG results demonstrated consistency with fMRI data acquired using the same paradigm.

Conclusions:

• The adapted IBL task is suitable for human studies, enabling direct comparison with rodent data.
• Optically pumped magnetometer-magnetoencephalography (OPM-MEG) is a viable neuroimaging technique for the IBL task in humans.
• Multimodal neuroimaging (OPM-MEG and fMRI) can bridge the gap between rodent neuronal recordings and human whole-brain activity patterns.