The population doctrine in cognitive neuroscience

TL;DR

The paper discusses the emerging population doctrine in neurophysiology, emphasizing its potential to advance understanding of cognition by analyzing neural populations through concepts like state spaces and dynamics.

Contribution

It formalizes the population doctrine and reviews recent work applying population-level analysis to cognitive processes, bridging neurophysiology and cognition.

Findings

Population neurophysiology offers new insights into attention and working memory.

Population-level analysis advances understanding of decision-making and reward processing.

Recent studies demonstrate the promise of population concepts in cognitive neuroscience.

Abstract

A major shift is happening within neurophysiology: a population doctrine is drawing level with the single-neuron doctrine that has long dominated the field. Population-level ideas have so far had their greatest impact in motor neuroscience, but they hold great promise for resolving open questions in cognition as well. Here, we codify the population doctrine and survey recent work that leverages this view to specifically probe cognition. Our discussion is organized around five core concepts that provide a foundation for population-level thinking: (1) state spaces, (2) manifolds, (3) coding dimensions, (4) subspaces, and (5) dynamics. The work we review illustrates the progress and promise that population neurophysiology holds for cognitive neuroscience$-$for delivering new insight into attention, working memory, decision-making, executive function, learning, and reward processing.