Behavioral alignment as an organizing principle in sensory coding

Abstract

The ultimate goal of sensory coding is to extract and represent the cues required for adaptive motor output. This suggests that sensory codes and behavioral outcomes may align, and a variety of studies have argued that both biological and engineered sensory systems represent stimuli similarly when they play similar roles in behavior. However, the extent to which behavioral demands determine sensory coding throughout the brain is largely unknown. Here we propose that behavioral alignment is a general principle that organizes sensory representations, and we show that carefully measured behavior can predictively account for visual encoding across the entire zebrafish brain. We discover population codes that represent visual motion stimuli according to the optomotor responses elicited by them, indicating that information required for behavioral selection is explicitly encoded in sensory populations. Brain-like neuronal responses result when sensory codes are optimized for efficiency and aligned to behavior. These results provide a paradigm for understanding sensory representations through the behaviors they drive.