Top-down coordination of local cortical state during selective attention

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Spontaneous fluctuations in cortical excitability impact sensory processing and behavior.
• These fluctuations were previously believed to be global but are now understood to be locally modulated during attention.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if cortical state fluctuations are coordinated across brain areas with retinotopic precision.
• To determine the effect of top-down attention on interareal state coordination.
• To assess the relationship between state coordination and behavioral performance.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of spontaneous fluctuations in cortical excitability, characterized by On and Off spiking activity.
• Examination of retinotopic maps across different brain areas.
• Measurement of interareal local state coordination during tasks involving spatially selective attention.

Main Results:

• Cortical state fluctuations (On/Off spiking) are coordinated across brain areas with retinotopic precision.
• Top-down attention significantly enhances this interareal local state coordination.
• The degree of local state coordination between brain regions predicts behavioral performance.

Conclusions:

• Cortical state dynamics are shared across multiple brain regions.
• Cognitive demands, such as attention, modulate these shared dynamics.
• Interareal coordination of cortical state fluctuations is behaviorally relevant.