by Dr Loren Koçillari (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia – IIT, Trento, and Universitätsklinikum Hamburg Eppendorf)

When: November 6, 2023, at 4:30 pm

Where: Sala Seminari VIMM (Building A, Ground Floor, Via Orus 2, Padova)

Functional connectivity (FC) plays a crucial role in understanding how correlated activity between brain regions supports neural information processing and communication. Previous research has primarily focused on redundant FC, typically using Pearson correlations to examine the similarity of activity across pairs of regions. However, recent studies have started exploring synergistic FC, which refers to the information that arises when two regions are considered together. In this presentation, I report our work [doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-43075-6_5] focalizes on the interplay between synergy and redundancy at the individual neuron level within the mouse’s primary auditory cortex during a sound discrimination task. Using calcium imaging data, we first identified neuron pairs with directed FC through Granger Causality. Subsequently, we used the novel information-theoretic framework of Partial Information Decomposition to quantify the redundant and synergistic information shared by these neurons in relation to the auditory stimulus.