Sensory information Modulate the Coupling of Spikes to LFP Phase

Background and Aim : Neural activity is either measured by spiking activity or local field potentials (LFPs). Spikes or action potentials provide information about the activity of single neurons. This type of activity may encode sensory information, for instance, neurons in macaque middle temporal area (MT) fire at different rates as a function of the direction of motion when the moving stimuli are presented inside their receptive fields. These activities, are further modulated by high-level cognitive functions, such as attention or adaptation.Methods : In this work, we investigated whether sensory information could be represented by SPC. For this purpose, we calculated the tuning curve based on SPC values. To estimate the SPC tuning curve, we computed the interconnection between spikes and the phase of LFP oscillations as a function of stimuli.Results : We found that the phase-locking follows a tuning curve based on the presented stimulus’ conditions. This function is inverted compared to the tuning of the spike rate.Conclusion : This finding suggests a functional role of SPC for sensory processing and information decoding.

Keywords:

working memory , sensory information , spike-phase coupling (SPC) , tuning curve , adaptation , attention