Neural Coding of Affective Internal States Underlying Innate Behaviors

David J. Anderson, PhD

Host: Hannah Lee (Linderman Lab)

This seminar is co-presented by Psychiatry Grand Rounds | Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Innate survival behaviors such as fighting, mating and predator defense are associated with affective or emotion states. Finding neural representations of such states using supervised analyses is challenging due to a lack of direct state measures. To overcome this limitations, we have performed unsupervised modeling of single-trial neural data acquired during naturalistic social behaviors, using recurrent Switching Linear Dynamical Systems (rSLDS). rSLDS learns a dynamics matrix based on latent factor activity in a state-space approximated by a set of linear substates, yielding a probabilistic model of neural dynamics. When used to model single-trial calcium imaging data recorded from hypothalamic “attack” neurons during aggressive encounters, rSLDS discovered an approximate line attractor that represents the intensity and duration of a scalable and persistent state of aggressiveness. I will discuss features of this representation, evidence for its local instantiation in the hypothalamus, mechanistic implementation and generalization to other social behaviors. Together, these results extend the potential role of line attractor dynamics beyond the representation of cognitive variables, to the representation of affective internal states. They also identify a tractable experimental platform to investigate how circuit-level mechanisms give rise to emergent network dynamics at the manifold level in the mammalian brain.

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⏰ Time: 12:00-1:00 PM (PT)
Come 15 minutes early (11:45 AM) to enjoy coffee, cookies, and conversation with the speaker and your colleagues (main campus location only)

📍 Locations:

• Main Campus (in person): Gunn Rotunda (E241), Stanford Neurosciences Building
• Stanford Research Park satellite locations:
  • 3172 Porter Drive, Room 283
  • 1070 Arastradero Road, Room 211

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