A large-scale circuit mechanism for hierarchical dynamical processing in the primate cortex

By Rishidev Chaudhuri, Kenneth Knoblauch, M. Gariel, Henry Kennedy, Xiao-Jing Wang. bioRxiv, 2015

579 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We developed a large-scale dynamical model of the macaque neocortex based on recent quantitative connectivity data. A hierarchy of timescales naturally emerges from this system: sensory areas show brief, transient responses to input (appropriate for sensory processing), whereas association areas integrate inputs over time and exhibit persistent activity (suitable for decision-making and working memory). The model displays multiple temporal hierarchies, as evidenced by contrasting responses to visual and somatosensory stimulation. Moreover, slower prefrontal and temporal areas have a disproportionate impact on global brain dynamics. These findings establish for the first time a circuit mechanism for “temporal receptive windows” that are progressively enlarged along the cortical hierarchy, extend the concept of working memory from local to large circuits, and suggest a re-interpretation of functional connectivity measures. Conflict of Interest The authors declare no competing financial interests. Acknowledgements We thank Nikola Markov and John Murray for discussions. This work was supported by ONR grant N00014-13-1-0297 and NIH grant R01MH062349 (X.-J.W.) and by ANR-11-BSV4-501 and LABEX CORTEX (ANR-11-LABX-0042) of Université de Lyon, program “Investissements d’Avenir” (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) operated by the French National Research Agency (H.K.). The connectivity data is available at www.core-nets.org.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14acc31819b82bd10b61726e33fb29f2d15f2c31

Citations in the corpus

• Neurodevelopment of the association cortices: Patterns, mechanisms, and implications for psychopathology (2021, unknown): “…macaque visual system (Felleman and Van Essen, 1991; Markov et al., 2014) and subsequently expanded to the entire primate cortex (Burt et al., 2018; Chaudhuri et al., 2015; Hilgetag and Goulas, 2020; Hilgetag et al., 2019), revealed how complex facets of cortical organization and communication can…”
• Hierarchical Heterogeneity across Human Cortex Shapes Large-Scale Neural Dynamics (2018, unknown): “As the spine count can be interpreted as a microanatomical correlate for the strength of recurrent synaptic excitation in local cortical microcircuits (Elston, 2003; Chaudhuri et al., 2015), this finding suggests the model should incorporate stronger values of wEE in association areas with low T1w/T”
• Aperiodic neural timescales in prefrontal cortex dilate with increased task abstraction (2025, unknown): “Neural timescales were conceptualized as intrinsic neural timescales—that is, an emergent property of the anatomical network structure of the brain (3), however, new empirical evidence calls into question whether neural timescales reflect a static network property of the brain, or alternatively,…”