Posterior parietal cortex represents sensory history and mediates its effects on behavior

Abstract

Many models of cognition and of neural computations posit the use and estimation of prior stimulus statistics1-4: it has long been known that working memory and perception are strongly impacted by previous sensory experience, even when that sensory history is irrelevant for the current task at hand. Nevertheless, the neural mechanisms and brain regions necessary for computing and using such priors are unknown. Here we report that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is a critical locus for the representation and use of prior stimulus information. We trained rats in an auditory Parametric Working Memory (PWM) task, and found that rats displayed substantial and readily quantifiable behavioral effects of sensory stimulus history, similar to those observed in humans5,6 and monkeys7. Earlier proposals that PPC supports working memory8,9 predict that optogenetic silencing of this region would impair behavior in our working memory task. Contrary to this prediction, silencing PPC significantly improved performance. Quantitative analyses of behavior revealed that this improvement was due to the selective reduction of the effects of prior sensory stimuli. Electrophysiological recordings showed that PPC neurons carried far more information about sensory stimuli of previous trials than about stimuli of the current trial. Furthermore, the more information about previous trial sensory history in the neural firing rates of a given rats PPC, the greater the behavioral effect of sensory history in that rat, suggesting a tight link between behavior and PPC representations of stimulus history. Our results indicate that the PPC is a central component in the processing of sensory stimulus history, and open a window for neurobiological investigation of long-standing questions regarding how perception and working memory are affected by prior sensory information.