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Volume 17, Number 23,
Issue of December 1, 1997
pp. 9248-9260
Synchronization of Neuronal Activity during Stimulus Expectation
in a Direction Discrimination Task
Received March 11, 1997; revised Aug. 29, 1997; accepted Sept. 15, 1997.
Simone Cardoso de Oliveira,
Alexander Thiele, and
Klaus-Peter Hoffmann
Allgemeine Zoologie und Neurobiologie, Ruhr-University Bochum,
D-44780 Bochum, Germany
The dorsal pathway of the primate brain, especially the middle
temporal area (MT or V5) and the superior middle temporal area (MST or
V5a), is strongly involved in motion detection. The relation between
neural firing rates and psychophysical performance has led to the
assumption that the neural code used by these areas consists of the
relative discharge rates of neuronal populations. As an additional
neural code, temporal correlation of neural activity has been
suggested. Our study addresses the involvement of such a code in awake
monkeys performing a motion discrimination task.
We found significant temporal correlations between simultaneously
recorded pairs of units in areas MT and MST and other extrastriate cortical areas. Units recorded from the same electrode were more frequently synchronized than units recorded from different electrodes placed within the same or different cortical areas. Activity
synchronization was present in the expectation period before stimulus
presentation and could not be induced de novo by the
stimulus. Rather, we found a contrast-dependent reduction of
correlation strength on stimulus onset. Correlation strength did not
vary systematically with stimulus directions. We conclude that under
the conditions of this study, temporal decorrelation of MT and MST
neurons could be used to detect the stimulus, but synchronization does
not convey specific information about its direction of motion and
therefore is unlikely to contribute to performance in our direction
discrimination task. Activity synchronization in the period before
stimulus onset could be related to attentive expectation.
Key words:
synchronization;
MT;
MST;
extrastriate cortex;
cross-correlation;
macaque monkey;
expectation;
attention;
motion
detection
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