Synergy mediates long-range correlations in the visual cortex near criticality

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

Background:

• Long-range correlations are crucial for critical systems, enabling extended interactions and emergent properties like high susceptibility.
• The brain exhibits long-range correlations across scales, suggesting criticality for optimized information processing and adaptability.
• Mechanisms driving these long-range neural correlations remain largely unknown.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of synergistic interactions in mediating long-range correlations in the awake mouse visual cortex.
• To understand how different information interaction types contribute to neural communication.

Main Methods:

• Utilized mesoscale two-photon calcium imaging to record activity from thousands of neurons across a wide field of view.
• Applied the Partial Information Decomposition (PID) framework to differentiate synergistic and redundant information interactions.
• Analyzed combined interaction networks to assess information processing efficiency.

Main Results:

• Confirmed the presence of long-range correlations at the neuronal population level.
• Found that increased long-range correlations during visual stimulation were associated with a rise in synergistic, not redundant, interactions.
• Demonstrated that synergistic and redundant interactions complement each other for efficient long-distance information processing, an effect amplified by visual stimulation.

Conclusions:

• Synergistic interactions play a key role in generating long-range correlations in the visual cortex.
• Complementarity between synergistic and redundant interactions is vital for efficient neural information processing across distances.
• Findings offer new insights into the computational basis of long-range correlations in neural systems.