Exploring the Architectural Biases of the Canonical Cortical Microcircuit

• Published in: bioRxiv
• Main Authors: Balwani, Aishwarya, Cho, Suhee, Choi, Hannah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 24.05.2024
• ISSN: 2692-8205; 2692-8205
• DOI: 10.1101/2024.05.23.595629

The cortex plays a crucial role in various perceptual and cognitive functions, driven by its basic unit, the . Yet, we remain short of a framework that definitively explains the structure-function relationships of this fundamental neuroanatomical motif. To better understand how physical substrates of cortical circuitry facilitate their neuronal dynamics, we employ a computational approach using recurrent neural networks and representational analyses. We examine the differences manifested by the inclusion and exclusion of biologically-motivated inter-areal laminar connections on the computational roles of different neuronal populations in the microcircuit of two hierarchically-related areas, throughout learning. Our findings show that the presence of feedback connections correlates with the functional modularization of cortical populations in different layers, and provides the microcircuit with a natural inductive bias to differentiate expected and unexpected inputs at initialization. Furthermore, when testing the effects of training the microcircuit and its variants with a predictive-coding inspired strategy, we find that doing so helps better encode noisy stimuli in areas of the cortex that receive feedback, all of which combine to suggest evidence for a predictive-coding mechanism serving as an intrinsic operative logic in the cortex.