Certainly true! These two things are related but not the same. This is actually a bit of a misstatement in the article as in the study we don’t look at response strength but at neurons based on their visual information (measured by ROC) metrics and find that they do not appear to be weighted more.

But also we try to be clearer on this in the paper but it’s hard in short form- we show that visual/task coding properties don’t determine read out but read out based on projection target is possible. I’d love to test that directly in the future!

Yeah this is an important point. Recurrent excitation in V1 could mean that neurons are recruiting more neurons and so they recruit neurons with all the important projection targets. I believe the great majority of L2/3 neurons connect to L5 which is an important output route.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if we still find the strategy is a bit different than that predicted by decoders! Like Jin et al 2019 showing that mice don’t seem to use negative weights on anti tuned neurons in their read out for orientation discrimination, even though that’s probably helpful

I’d speculate I’d see the same in other discrimination tasks where averaging regardless of neural vis properties is viable. But different oris of equal contrast stimuli drive very similar average V1 activity, so that presumably needs different strategy. Marshel et al 2019 also supports this idea.

I definitely don't think I would've gotten the same results in several common discrimination tasks (ie orientation discrimination). But, in addition to your results, Gauld et al's 2024 photostim results are also consistent with averaging occurring in discrim when the task is amenable to it.

Take that with a grain of salt though since this spontaneous dataset isn’t huge!

Thanks! We did look at this a little. Generally PCA pulls out components related to visual or task variables so you get the same results. But I also ran PCA on only intertrial activity and didn’t see any link between weights and behavioral relevance