Granger sensori-behavioral functional taxonomy of neuronal ensemble activity from two-photon calcium imaging data.

A unified framework reveals directional neuronal interactions and sensory-behavioral encoding in mouse auditory cortex with up to 30% improvement over existing methods.

• Why it matters: Understanding how neuronal populations encode and transform sensory information into behavior is crucial for advancing computational neuroscience, yet current methods struggle with indirect, noisy data and complex interactions.
• What they did: The authors developed a modeling and inference framework combining state-space modeling, variational inference, and point processes to extract Granger causal effects and identify sensory feature encoding from two-photon calcium imaging data in mice.
• The result: Applying this approach to mouse auditory cortex data uncovered distinct neuron groups with diverse sensori-behavioral roles and connectivity changes linked to behavioral accuracy, enabling deeper insights into neural information processing.