Attentional Stimulus Selection through Selective Synchronization between Monkey Visual Areas

By Conrado A. Bosman, Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen, Nicolas M. Brunet, Robert Oostenveld, André Moraes Bastos, Thilo Womelsdorf, Birthe Rubehn, Thomas Christian Stieglitz, P. De Weerd, Pascal Fries. Neuron, 2012

740 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY A central motif in neuronal networks is convergence, linking several input neurons to one target neuron. In visual cortex, convergence renders target neurons responsive to complex stimuli. Yet, convergence typically sends multiple stimuli to a target, and the behaviorally relevant stimulus must be selected. We used two stimuli, activating separate electrocorticographic V1 sites, and both activating an electrocorticographic V4 site equally strongly. When one of those stimuli activated one V1 site, it gamma-synchronized (60–80 Hz) to V4. When the two stimuli activated two V1 sites, primarily the relevant one gamma-synchronized to V4. Frequency bands of gamma activities showed substantial overlap containing the band of inter-areal coherence. The relevant V1 site had its gamma peak frequency 2–3 Hz higher than the irrelevant V1 site, and 4–6 Hz higher than V4. Gamma-mediated inter-areal influences were predominantly directed from V1 to V4. We propose that selective synchronization renders relevant input effective, thereby modulating effective connectivity.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5e22d18d9074062b2fcacf28b5e53ba9af0bcfa

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Dynamic functional connectivity: Promise, issues, and interpretations (2013, background): “For example, long-range coherence in the gamma band has been found to index, among other functions, the coding for a prospective reward (Fujisawa and Buzsaki, 2011) or an attended, behaviorally relevant visual stimulus (Bosman et al., 2012; Gregoriou et al., 2009; Grothe et al., 2012).”
The graphical brain: Belief propagation and active inference (2017, background): “…and the rates of change of expectations are functions of prediction errors, one would expect to see the same sort of spectral differences in laminar-specific oscillations that have been previously discussed in the context of predictive coding (Bastos et al., 2012, 2015; Bosman et al., 2012).”
Waking State: Rapid Variations Modulate Neural and Behavioral Responses (2015, neutral): “…as heart rate and galvanic skin reflex, indicating a tight coupling between the state of the central andperipheral nervous systems (Alnæs et al., 2014; Bradley et al., 2008; de Gee et al., 2014; Einhäuser et al., 2008, 2010; Eldar et al., 2013; Gilzenrat et al., 2010; Hess and Polt, 1960, 1964;…”
Cortical High-Density Counterstream Architectures (2013, background): “These differences in coherence reflect differences in interareal synchronization (73–76), which are thought to facilitate effective communication (74, 77).”
A Tutorial Review of Functional Connectivity Analysis Methods and Their Interpretational Pitfalls (2016, methodology): “In such cases, one could resort to stratification techniques (Bosman et al., 2012) where across conditions, the distributional properties of signal power are made as similar as possible, by means of trial subsampling.”
Rhythms For Cognition: Communication Through Coherence (2015, neutral): “…article: stimulus salience and top-down attention are translated into gamma frequency, and theta-rhythmic gamma phase resets turn V1 gamma-frequency differences into V4 input-latency differences, with the earliest input representing the most salient and/or attended stimulus (Bosman et al., 2012).”
Cortical areas interact through a communication subspace (2019, neutral): “These fluctuations involve spiking activity that could propagate between areas, and thus provides a useful window for understanding inter-areal interactions (Fries et al., 2001; Pesaran et al., 2008; Bosman et al., 2012; Saalmann et al., 2012; Salazar et al., 2012).”
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Neural Cross-Frequency Coupling: Connecting Architectures, Mechanisms, and Functions. (2015, neutral): “A similar mechanism might be at work in visual cortex, where theta phase modulates V1/V4 gamma synchronization during a selective attentional task [77,78].”
Gamma-band synchronization in the neocortex: novel analysis methods and their application to sensory and motivational systems (2013, background): “, 2013), visual cortex and parietal cortex (Roelfsema et al., 1997; von Stein et al., 2000; Saalmann et al., 2007; Bosman et al., 2012), V4 and FEF (Frontal Eye Fields) (Gregoriou et al.”
A Feedback Model of Attention Explains the Diverse Effects of Attention on Neural Firing Rates and Receptive Field Structure (2016, background): “In particular, it cannot describe known effects of attention on firing synchrony [40] and noise decorrelation [41], or the stronger effect of attention on the late phase of neural responses.”