Temporal structure in neuronal activity during working memory in macaque parietal cortex

By Bijan Pesaran, John S. Pezaris, Maneesh Sahani, Partha P. Mitra, Richard A. Andersen. Nature Neuroscience, 2000

1,103 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many cortical structures have elevated firing rates during working memory, but it is not known how the activity is maintained. To investigate whether reverberating activity is important, we studied the temporal structure of local field potential (LFP) activity and spiking from area LIP in two awake macaques during a memory-saccade task. Using spectral analysis, we found spatially tuned elevated power in the gamma band (25–90 Hz) in LFP and spiking activity during the memory period. Spiking and LFP activity were also coherent in the gamma band but not at lower frequencies. Finally, we decoded LFP activity on a single-trial basis and found that LFP activity in parietal cortex discriminated between preferred and anti-preferred direction with approximately the same accuracy as the spike rate and predicted the time of a planned movement with better accuracy than the spike rate. This finding could accelerate the development of a cortical neural prosthesis.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bafdfd3634d8c7bab669bdefe7139c368d806905

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Gamma and beta bursts underlie working memory (2016, positive): “This is consistent with observations of increased gamma power in lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) in monkeys during the encoding and decoding epochs of a delayed saccade task (Pesaran et al., 2002).”
Multiple neural spike train data analysis: state-of-the-art and future challenges (2004, methodology): “These methods have also proved useful in estimating coherence between spike trains and local field potential”
Phase Synchrony among Neuronal Oscillations in the Human Cortex (2005, background): “…in feature binding (Gray et al., 1989; Singer, 1999; Tallon-Baudry and Bertrand, 1999; Varela et al., 2001), and they have also been detected during working memory maintenance when sustained activation of neural representations is required (Tallon-Baudry et al., 2001; Pesaran et al., 2002).”
The Design of Integrated Circuits to Observe Brain Activity (2008, methodology): “Most analysis of LFP information involves tracking the energy of LFP signals in a certain narrow range of frequencies (e.g., 20–40 Hz) [ 28 ].”
Nonlinear multivariate analysis of neurophysiological signals. (2005, methodology): “Additionally, specific methods have been derived for the reliable estimation of the coherence function as well as its confident limits in point processes such as sequences of neural action potentials (Jarvis and Mitra, 2001; Pesaran et al., 2002).”
Low-Frequency Local Field Potentials and Spikes in Primary Visual Cortex Convey Independent Visual Information (2008, background): “…in spectral analysis of spike trains and is related to the near-Poissonian statistics of cortical spike trains, which causes the power spectrum of a spike train at high frequencies to be approximately proportional to the total number of spikes in the train (Bair et al., 1994; Pesaran et al., 2002).”
THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF WORKING MEMORY (2007, background): “Specifically, the relative importance of cortico-cortical loops (long-range recurrent interactions), thalamo-cortical loops, or local cortical mechanisms (such as excitatory reverberation), for the generation of persistent neural activity has yet to be determined (Wang 2001; Pesaran et al. 2002).”
Supplementary Materials for A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain (2012, neutral): “Serial working memory A3 [3 2 4 3 5] ? A3 [4 2 5 3 4 2] ? 3 2 4 3 5 4 2 5 – 4 2 Counting A4 [3] [2] ? A4 [0] [7] ? 5 7 Question answering A5 [4 3 8 6] [K] [4] ? A5 [4 3 8 6] [P] [4] ? 1 6 Rapid variable creation A6 [3312] [12 ][3392] [92] [3362] [62] [3342] ? A6 [342] [2 ][345] [5] [347] [7] [340] ?”
The Science of Neural Interface Systems (2009, positive): “Studies have begun to investigate how information in the field potential compares with that in spikes (Belitski et al. 2008, Buneo et al. 2003, Donoghue et al. 1998, Murthy & Fetz 1996, Pesaran et al. 2002).”
Intention, action planning, and decision making in parietal-frontal circuits. (2009, background): “…of the oscillations in certain frequency bands are modulated with attention and motor preparation in the parietal, occipital, and frontal lobe areas (Fries et al., 2001; Pesaran et al., 2002; Scherberger et al., 2005; Murthy and Fetz, 1996; Sanes and Donoghue, 1993; Mehring et al., 2003).”
Learning to Control a Brain–Machine Interface for Reaching and Grasping by Primates (2003, background): “A couple of laboratories have focused on the primary motor cortex (M1) (Serruya et al. 2002; Taylor et al. 2002), while another group has selected the parietal cortex as the main input to a BMI (Pesaran et al. 2002).”
Theta and Gamma Oscillations Predict Encoding and Retrieval of Declarative Memory (2006, background): “Both theta and gamma activity has been reported during maintenance of working memory representations in monkeys (Pesaran et al., 2002; Lee et al., 2005) and humans (Gevins et al.”