TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kienitz, Ricardo
A1  - Schmiedt, Joscha Tapani
A1  - Shapcott, Katharine A.
A1  - Kouroupaki, Kleopatra
A1  - Saunders, Richard C.
A1  - Schmid, Michael Christoph
T1  - Theta rhythmic neuronal activity and reaction times arising from cortical receptive field interactions during distributed attention
T2  - Current biology
N2  - 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 (RFs) 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 (RTs) 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 theta frequencies. These findings show that theta rhythmic neuronal activity can arise from competitive RF interactions and that this rhythm may result in rhythmic RTs potentially subserving attentional sampling.
KW  - vision
KW  - attention
KW  - microsaccades
KW  - oscillations
KW  - rhythm
KW  - visual cortex
KW  - V4
KW  - neurophysiology
KW  - monkey
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/46393
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-463937
SN  - 1879-0445
SN  - 0960-9822
N1  - This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
VL  - 28
IS  - 15
SP  - 2377 + e1
EP  - 2387 + e5
PB  - Current Biology Ltd.
CY  - London
ER  -