Talk on Distinct computational roles of excitatory and inhibitory neurons at the Simons Foundation
Date:
The balance between excitation and inhibition (E/I) is central to cortical computation and has been implicated in autism, yet the distinct functional roles of excitatory and inhibitory neurons remain unclear. In this talk, I present large-scale recordings from macaque inferior temporal cortex during object recognition and detail how these populations each contribute to neural representations and behavior. I show that excitatory and inhibitory neurons differ in low-level properties (firing rate, latency, …) but also their decoding performance and manifold geometry, and their alignment with artificial neural networks. Moreover, the two populations explain partially dissociable components of image-level behavioral performance, suggesting complementary computational roles. These findings provide a circuit-level framework for understanding how E/I balance shapes visual representations and offer a principled foundation for testing E/I imbalance hypotheses in computational models of autism.