Summary: Neurons in the primary cortex carry sensory- and behaviour-related information, but it remains an open question how this information emerges and intersects together during learning. Current evidence points to two possible learning-related changes: sensory information increases in the primary cortex or sensory information remains stable, but its readout efficiency in association cortices increases. We investigated this question by imaging neuronal activity in mouse primary somatosensory cortex before, during, and after learning of an object localization task. We quantified sensory- and behaviour-related information and estimated how much sensory information was used to instruct perceptual choices as learning progressed. We find that sensory information increases from the start of training, while choice information is mostly present in the later stages of learning. Additionally, the readout of sensory information becomes more efficient with learning as early as in the primary sensory cortex. Together, our results highlight the importance of primary cortical neurons in perceptual learning.

Biosketch: Michael Kohl received a B.Sc in Neuroscience (2005) from University College London, and, as part of the Wellcome Trust Oxford Ion Channel Initiative, a D.Phil in Physiology (2009) from the University of Oxford. He carried out his postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University (2010-2011) and the University of California, Berkeley (2012-2013). He became an Early Career Research Fellow at the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics in 2013 and University Research Lecturer in 2018. He took up a Senior Lectureship in Neuroscience in the Centre for Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow in 2018.