When Sound Maps Bias Decisions

This episode explores how mice trained to discriminate pulsed sounds showed shared, systematic choice biases even when sounds had the same reinforced pulse count. Seiler and colleagues found that auditory cortex population activity represented four major timing-related sound features, and that entanglement between task-relevant and task-irrelevant feature axes predicted part of the animals' perceptual bias. Reference: Seiler et al. (2026) "Representational geometry of sounds in the auditory cortex explains biases in perceptual decision-making in mice" Cell Reports 45, 117221. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117221