Model discovery to link neural activity to behavioral tasks

Brains are not engineered solutions to a well-defined problem but arose through selective pressure acting on random variation. It is therefore unclear how well a model chosen by an experimenter can relate neural activity to experimental conditions. Here, we developed ‘model identification of neural encoding (MINE).’ MINE is an accessible framework using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to discover and characterize a model that relates aspects of tasks to neural activity. Although flexible, CNNs are difficult to interpret. We use Taylor decomposition approaches to understand the discovered model and how it maps task features to activity. We apply MINE to a published cortical dataset as well as experiments designed to probe thermoregulatory circuits in zebrafish. Here, MINE allowed us to characterize neurons according to their receptive field and computational complexity, features that anatomically segregate in the brain. We also identified a new class of neurons that integrate thermosensory and behavioral information that eluded us previously when using traditional clustering and regression-based approaches.