Exploring the Architectural Biases of the Cortical Microcircuit

The cortex plays a crucial role in various perceptual and cognitive functions, driven by its basic unit, the canonical cortical microcircuit. Yet, we remain short of a framework that definitively explains the structure-function relationships of this fundamental neuroanatomical motif. To better understand how physical substrates of cortical circuitry facilitate their neuronal dynamics, we employ a computational approach using recurrent neural networks and representational analyses. We examine the differences manifested by the inclusion and exclusion of biologically motivated interareal laminar connections on the computational roles of different neuronal populations in the microcircuit of hierarchically related areas throughout learning. Our findings show that the presence of feedback connections correlates with the functional modularization of cortical populations in different layers and provides the microcircuit with a natural inductive bias to differentiate expected and unexpected inputs at initialization, which we justify mathematically. Furthermore, when testing the effects of training the microcircuit and its variants with a predictive-coding-inspired strategy, we find that doing so helps better encode noisy stimuli in areas of the cortex that receive feedback, all of which combine to suggest evidence for a predictive-coding mechanism serving as an intrinsic operative logic in the cortex.