Neural variability determines coding strategies for natural self-motion in macaque monkeys

Noisy galvanic vestibular stimulation induces stochastic resonance in vestibular perceptual thresholds assessed efficiently using confidence reports

In sensory perception, stochastic resonance (SR) refers to the application of noise to enhance information transfer, allowing for the sensing of lower-level stimuli. Previously, subjective-assessments identified SR in vestibular perceptual thresholds, assessed using a standard two alternative (i.e., binary), forced-choice task, when applying noisy Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (nGVS). However, this required extensive testing of at least 100 binary trials to yield sufficiently precise thresholds at each of several nGVS amplitudes, leading to confounds of fatigue, sleepiness, learning, etc. stalling the study of vestibular SR. To mitigate this, we explore confidence reporting, which via a confidence signal detection (CSD) model may much more efficiently identify SR (i.e., with fewer trials), if SR exists in CSD thresholds. To test this, Y-translation thresholds were tested with 100 trials at each nGVS amplitude (0 or sham, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 and 0.4 mA peak-to-peak). To objectively identify SR, we applied a machine learning classification algorithm trained on simulated datasets. We found significant evidence of SR exhibition using CSD thresholds (p = 0.0025), with six of 10 subjects classified as exhibiting SR. Next, we considered fewer trials, finding the false positive rate of SR identification to be better using CSD thresholds with as few as 50 trials, when compared to 100 binary trials. Applying the CSD model to our subject's data with a subset of their trials found similar classifications of SR exhibition as with 100 binary trials. We demonstrate CSD thresholds exhibit SR, proving a means of better and much more efficiently identifying SR.

Restoring vestibular function during natural self-motion: Progress and challenges

The vestibular system is integral to behavior; the loss of peripheral vestibular function leads to disabling consequences, such as blurred vision, dizziness, and unstable posture, severely limiting activities of daily living. Fortunately, the vestibular system's well-defined peripheral structure and well-understood encoding strategies offer unique opportunities for developing sensory prostheses to restore vestibular function. While these devices show promising results in both animal models and implanted patients, substantial room for improvement remains. Research from an engineering perspective has largely focused on optimizing stimulation protocol to improve outcomes. However, this approach has often been pursued in isolation from research in neuroscience that has enriched our understanding of neural responses at the synaptic, cellular, and circuit levels. Accordingly, this review bridges the domains of neuroscience and engineering to consider recent progress and challenges in vestibular prosthesis development. We advocate for interdisciplinary approaches that leverage studies of neural circuits at the population level, especially in light of recent advancement in large-scale recording technology, to identify impediments still to overcome and to develop more naturalistic stimulation strategies. Fully integrating neuroscience and engineering in the context of prosthesis development will help advance the field forward and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

Neural populations within macaque early vestibular pathways are adapted to encode natural self-motion

How the activities of large neural populations are integrated in the brain to ensure accurate perception and behavior remains a central problem in systems neuroscience. Here, we investigated population coding of naturalistic self-motion by neurons within early vestibular pathways in rhesus macaques (Macacca mulatta). While vestibular neurons displayed similar dynamic tuning to self-motion, inspection of their spike trains revealed significant heterogeneity. Further analysis revealed that, during natural but not artificial stimulation, heterogeneity resulted primarily from variability across neurons as opposed to trial-to-trial variability. Interestingly, vestibular neurons displayed different correlation structures during naturalistic and artificial self-motion. Specifically, while correlations due to the stimulus (i.e., signal correlations) did not differ, correlations between the trial-to-trial variabilities of neural responses (i.e., noise correlations) were instead significantly positive during naturalistic but not artificial stimulation. Using computational modeling, we show that positive noise correlations during naturalistic stimulation benefits information transmission by heterogeneous vestibular neural populations. Taken together, our results provide evidence that neurons within early vestibular pathways are adapted to the statistics of natural self-motion stimuli at the population level. We suggest that similar adaptations will be found in other systems and species.

Multisensory gaze stabilization in response to subchronic alteration of vestibular type I hair cells

The functional complementarity of the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and optokinetic reflex (OKR) allows for optimal combined gaze stabilization responses (CGR) in light. While sensory substitution has been reported following complete vestibular loss, the capacity of the central vestibular system to compensate for partial peripheral vestibular loss remains to be determined. Here, we first demonstrate the efficacy of a 6-week subchronic ototoxic protocol in inducing transient and partial vestibular loss which equally affects the canal- and otolith-dependent VORs. Immunostaining of hair cells in the vestibular sensory epithelia revealed that organ-specific alteration of type I, but not type II, hair cells correlates with functional impairments. The decrease in VOR performance is paralleled with an increase in the gain of the OKR occurring in a specific range of frequencies where VOR normally dominates gaze stabilization, compatible with a sensory substitution process. Comparison of unimodal OKR or VOR versus bimodal CGR revealed that visuo-vestibular interactions remain reduced despite a significant recovery in the VOR. Modeling and sweep-based analysis revealed that the differential capacity to optimally combine OKR and VOR correlates with the reproducibility of the VOR responses. Overall, these results shed light on the multisensory reweighting occurring in pathologies with fluctuating peripheral vestibular malfunction.

Vestibular perceptual testing from lab to clinic: a review

Not all dizziness presents as vertigo, suggesting other perceptual symptoms for individuals with vestibular disease. These non-specific perceptual complaints of dizziness have led to a recent resurgence in literature examining vestibular perceptual testing with the aim to enhance clinical diagnostics and therapeutics. Recent evidence supports incorporating rehabilitation methods to retrain vestibular perception. This review describes the current field of vestibular perceptual testing from scientific laboratory techniques that may not be clinic friendly to some low-tech options that may be more clinic friendly. Limitations are highlighted suggesting directions for additional research.

Serotonin increases population coding of behaviorally relevant stimuli by enhancing responses of ON but not OFF-type sensory neurons

How neural populations encode sensory input to generate behavioral responses remains a central problem in systems neuroscience. Here we investigated how neuromodulation influences population coding of behaviorally relevant stimuli to give rise to behavior in the electrosensory system of the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus. We performed multi-unit recordings from ON and OFF sensory pyramidal cells in response to stimuli whose amplitude (i.e., envelope) varied in time, before and after electrical stimulation of the raphe nuclei. Overall, raphe stimulation increased population coding by ON- but not by OFF-type cells, despite both cell types showing similar sensitivities to the stimulus at the single neuron level. Surprisingly, only changes in population coding by ON-type cells were correlated with changes in behavioral responses. Taken together, our results show that neuromodulation differentially affects ON vs. OFF-type cells in order to enhance perception of behaviorally relevant sensory input.

Noise and vestibular perception of passive self-motion

Noise defined as random disturbances is ubiquitous in both the external environment and the nervous system. Depending on the context, noise can degrade or improve information processing and performance. In all cases, it contributes to neural systems dynamics. We review some effects of various sources of noise on the neural processing of self-motion signals at different stages of the vestibular pathways and the resulting perceptual responses. Hair cells in the inner ear reduce the impact of noise by means of mechanical and neural filtering. Hair cells synapse on regular and irregular afferents. Variability of discharge (noise) is low in regular afferents and high in irregular units. The high variability of irregular units provides information about the envelope of naturalistic head motion stimuli. A subset of neurons in the vestibular nuclei and thalamus are optimally tuned to noisy motion stimuli that reproduce the statistics of naturalistic head movements. In the thalamus, variability of neural discharge increases with increasing motion amplitude but saturates at high amplitudes, accounting for behavioral violation of Weber's law. In general, the precision of individual vestibular neurons in encoding head motion is worse than the perceptual precision measured behaviorally. However, the global precision predicted by neural population codes matches the high behavioral precision. The latter is estimated by means of psychometric functions for detection or discrimination of whole-body displacements. Vestibular motion thresholds (inverse of precision) reflect the contribution of intrinsic and extrinsic noise to perception. Vestibular motion thresholds tend to deteriorate progressively after the age of 40 years, possibly due to oxidative stress resulting from high discharge rates and metabolic loads of vestibular afferents. In the elderly, vestibular thresholds correlate with postural stability: the higher the threshold, the greater is the postural imbalance and risk of falling. Experimental application of optimal levels of either galvanic noise or whole-body oscillations can ameliorate vestibular function with a mechanism reminiscent of stochastic resonance. Assessment of vestibular thresholds is diagnostic in several types of vestibulopathies, and vestibular stimulation might be useful in vestibular rehabilitation.

Neural substrates of perception in the vestibular thalamus during natural self-motion: A review

Accumulating evidence across multiple sensory modalities suggests that the thalamus does not simply relay information from the periphery to the cortex. Here we review recent findings showing that vestibular neurons within the ventral posteriolateral area of the thalamus perform nonlinear transformations on their afferent input that determine our subjective awareness of motion. Specifically, these neurons provide a substrate for previous psychophysical observations that perceptual discrimination thresholds are much better than predictions from Weber's law. This is because neural discrimination thresholds, which are determined from both variability and sensitivity, initially increase but then saturate with increasing stimulus amplitude, thereby matching the previously observed dependency of perceptual self-motion discrimination thresholds. Moreover, neural response dynamics give rise to unambiguous and optimized encoding of natural but not artificial stimuli. Finally, vestibular thalamic neurons selectively encode passively applied motion when occurring concurrently with voluntary (i.e., active) movements. Taken together, these results show that the vestibular thalamus plays an essential role towards generating motion perception as well as shaping our vestibular sense of agency that is not simply inherited from afferent input.

Sensory adaptation mediates efficient and unambiguous encoding of natural stimuli by vestibular thalamocortical pathways

Sensory systems must continuously adapt to optimally encode stimuli encountered within the natural environment. The prevailing view is that such optimal coding comes at the cost of increased ambiguity, yet to date, prior studies have focused on artificial stimuli. Accordingly, here we investigated whether such a trade-off between optimality and ambiguity exists in the encoding of natural stimuli in the vestibular system. We recorded vestibular nuclei and their target vestibular thalamocortical neurons during naturalistic and artificial self-motion stimulation. Surprisingly, we found no trade-off between optimality and ambiguity. Using computational methods, we demonstrate that thalamocortical neural adaptation in the form of contrast gain control actually reduces coding ambiguity without compromising the optimality of coding under naturalistic but not artificial stimulation. Thus, taken together, our results challenge the common wisdom that adaptation leads to ambiguity and instead suggest an essential role in underlying unambiguous optimized encoding of natural stimuli.

Imbalance and dizziness caused by unilateral vestibular schwannomas correlate with vestibulo-ocular reflex precision and bias

Imbalance and dizziness are disabling symptoms for many patients with vestibular schwannomas (VS) but symptom severity typically does not correlate with the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) amplitude-based metrics used to assess peripheral vestibular damage. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that imbalance and dizziness in patients with VS relate to VOR metrics that are not based on response amplitude. Twenty-four patients with unilateral, sporadic VS tumors were studied, and objective (balance) and subjective (dizziness) vestibular dysfunction was quantified. The VOR was tested using two yaw-axis motion stimuli, low-frequency en-bloc sinusoidal, and high-frequency head-on-body impulsive rotations. Imbalance correlated with VOR precision (the inverse of the trial-to-trial variability) and with low-frequency VOR dynamics (quantified with the time constant), and these two metrics were also strongly correlated. Dizziness correlated with the VOR bias caused by an imbalance in static central vestibular tone, but not with dynamic VOR metrics. VOR accuracy (mean response amplitude relative to the ideal response) was not correlated with the severity of imbalance or dizziness or with measures of VOR precision or time constant. Imbalance in patients with VS, therefore, scales with VOR precision and time constant, both of which appear to reflect the central vestibular signal-to-noise ratio, but not with VOR slow-phase accuracy, which is based on the magnitude of the central vestibular signals. Dizziness was related to the presence of a static central tone imbalance but not to any VOR metrics, suggesting that abnormal perception in VS may be affected by factors that are not captured by yaw-axis VOR measurements.NEW & NOTEWORTHY The severity of symptoms associated with unilateral vestibular schwannomas (VS) is poorly correlated with standard yaw-axis vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) metrics that are based on response amplitude. In this study, we show that the balance and perceptual dysfunction experienced by patients with VS scales with VOR metrics that capture information about the central signal-to-noise ratio (balance) and central static tone (dizziness), but are not correlated with the VOR gain, which reflects central signal amplitude.

Stochastic and sinusoidal electrical stimuli increase the irregularity and gain of Type A and B medial vestibular nucleus neurons, in vitro

Galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) has been shown to improve vestibular function potentially via stochastic resonance, however, it remains unknown how central vestibular nuclei process these signals. In vivo work applying electrical stimuli to the vestibular apparatus of animals has shown changes in neuronal discharge at the level of the primary vestibular afferents and hair cells. This study aimed to determine the cellular impacts of stochastic, sinusoidal, and stochastic + sinusoidal stimuli on individual medial vestibular nucleus (MVN) neurons of male and female C57BL/6 mice. All stimuli increased the irregularity of MVN neuronal discharge, while differentially affecting neuronal gain. This suggests that the heterogeneous MVN neuronal population (marked by differential expression of ion channels), may influence the impact of electrical stimuli on neuronal discharge. Neuronal subtypes showed increased variability of neuronal firing, where Type A and B neurons experienced the largest gain changes in response to stochastic and sinusoidal stimuli. Type C neurons were the least affected regarding neuronal firing variability and gain changes. The membrane potential (MP) of neurons was altered by sinusoidal and stochastic + sinusoidal stimuli, with Type B and C neuronal MP significantly affected. These results indicate that GVS-like electrical stimuli impact MVN neuronal discharge differentially, likely as a result of heterogeneous ion channel expression.

Neural variability determines coding strategies for natural self-motion in macaque monkeys

We have previously reported that central neurons mediating vestibulo-spinal reflexes and self-motion perception optimally encode natural self-motion (Mitchell et al., 2018). Importantly however, the vestibular nuclei also comprise other neuronal classes that mediate essential functions such as the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) and its adaptation. Here we show that heterogeneities in resting discharge variability mediate a trade-off between faithful encoding and optimal coding via temporal whitening. Specifically, neurons displaying lower variability did not whiten naturalistic self-motion but instead faithfully represented the stimulus' detailed time course, while neurons displaying higher variability displayed temporal whitening. Using a well-established model of VOR pathways, we demonstrate that faithful stimulus encoding is necessary to generate the compensatory eye movements found experimentally during naturalistic self-motion. Our findings suggest a novel functional role for variability toward establishing different coding strategies: (1) faithful stimulus encoding for generating the VOR; (2) optimized coding via temporal whitening for other vestibular functions.