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

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Intrinsic timescales are fundamental to neural activity dynamics and vary across cortical areas.
• Understanding how these timescales change during cognitive tasks, like spatial attention, is crucial for deciphering brain function.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the dynamics of intrinsic timescales in area V4 during spatial attention tasks.
• To determine how neural activity timescales are modulated by cognitive states and attention.

Main Methods:

• Measured local spiking activity and intrinsic timescales within V4 columns in male monkeys.
• Analyzed neural activity across fast and slow timescales during spatial attention performance.
• Evaluated network models to explain observed spatiotemporal correlations and attentional modulation.

Main Results:

• Neural activity in V4 exhibited at least two distinct timescales: fast and slow.
• The slow timescale significantly increased when monkeys attended to receptive field locations.
• This increase in the slow timescale correlated with behavioral reaction times.
• Network models indicated that spatially arranged connectivity and enhanced recurrent interactions best explained the data.

Conclusions:

• Multiple timescales in the visual cortex likely arise from recurrent network interactions shaped by spatial connectivity.
• Attentional modulation of these timescales is driven by dynamic changes in the efficacy of recurrent interactions.
• Intrinsic timescales are flexible and dynamically adjust with cognitive states, reflecting adaptive neural processing.