TY  - INPR
A1  - Kienitz, Ricardo
A1  - Schmiedt, Joscha Tapani
A1  - Shapcott, Katharine A.
A1  - Kouroupaki, Kleopatra
A1  - Saunders, Richard C.
A1  - Schmid, Michael Christoph
T1  - Rhythmic neural spiking and attentional sampling arising from cortical receptive field interactions
T2  - bioRxiv
N2  - Summary: Growing evidence suggests that distributed spatial attention may invoke theta (3-9 Hz) rhythmic sampling processes. The neuronal basis of such attentional sampling is however not fully understood. Here we show using array recordings in visual cortical area V4 of two awake macaques that presenting separate visual stimuli to the excitatory center and suppressive surround of neuronal receptive fields elicits rhythmic multi-unit activity (MUA) at 3-6 Hz. This neuronal rhythm did not depend on small fixational eye movements. In the context of a distributed spatial attention task, during which the monkeys detected a spatially and temporally uncertain target, reaction times (RT) exhibited similar rhythmic fluctuations. RTs were fast or slow depending on the target occurrence during high or low MUA, resulting in rhythmic MUA-RT cross-correlations at at theta frequencies. These findings suggest that theta-rhythmic neuronal activity arises from competitive receptive field interactions and that this rhythm may subserve attentional sampling.
Highlights:
* Center-surround interactions induce theta-rhythmic MUA of visual cortex neurons
* The MUA rhythm does not depend on small fixational eye movements
* Reaction time fluctuations lock to the neuronal rhythm under distributed attention
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/72453
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-724537
IS  - 252130 Version 1
PB  - bioRxiv
ER  -