Neural Intrinsic Timescales in the Macaque Dorsal Premotor Cortex Predict the Strength of Spatial Response Coding

Our brain continuously receives information over multiple timescales that are differently processed across areas. In this study, we investigated the intrinsic timescale of neurons in the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) of two rhesus macaques while performing a non-match-to-goal task. The task rule was to reject the previously chosen target and select the alternative one. We defined the intrinsic timescale as the decay constant of the autocorrelation structure computed during a baseline period of the task. We found that neurons with longer intrinsic timescale tended to maintain a stronger spatial response coding during a delay period. This result suggests that longer intrinsic timescales predict the functional role of PMd neurons in a cognitive task. Our estimate of the intrinsic timescale integrates an existing hierarchical model (Murray et al., 2014), by assigning to PMd a lower position than prefrontal cortex in the hierarchical ordering of the brain areas based on neurons' timescales.