Intrinsic timescales in the visual cortex change with selective attention and reflect spatial connectivity

Roxana Zeraati, Yan-Liang Shi, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Marc A. Gieselmann, Alexander Thiele, Tirin Moore, Anna Levina () and Tatiana A. Engel ()
Additional contact information
Roxana Zeraati: University of Tübingen
Yan-Liang Shi: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Nicholas A. Steinmetz: University of Washington
Marc A. Gieselmann: Newcastle University
Alexander Thiele: Newcastle University
Tirin Moore: Stanford University
Anna Levina: Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
Tatiana A. Engel: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: Abstract Intrinsic timescales characterize dynamics of endogenous fluctuations in neural activity. Variation of intrinsic timescales across the neocortex reflects functional specialization of cortical areas, but less is known about how intrinsic timescales change during cognitive tasks. We measured intrinsic timescales of local spiking activity within columns of area V4 in male monkeys performing spatial attention tasks. The ongoing spiking activity unfolded across at least two distinct timescales, fast and slow. The slow timescale increased when monkeys attended to the receptive fields location and correlated with reaction times. By evaluating predictions of several network models, we found that spatiotemporal correlations in V4 activity were best explained by the model in which multiple timescales arise from recurrent interactions shaped by spatially arranged connectivity, and attentional modulation of timescales results from an increase in the efficacy of recurrent interactions. Our results suggest that multiple timescales may arise from the spatial connectivity in the visual cortex and flexibly change with the cognitive state due to dynamic effective interactions between neurons.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37613-7 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:14:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-023-37613-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37613-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().