Orthogonalization of spontaneous and stimulus-driven activity by hierarchical neocortical areal network in primates

How biological neural networks reliably process information in the presence of spontaneous activity remains controversial. In mouse primary visual cortex (V1), stimulus-evoked and spontaneous activity show orthogonal (dissimilar) patterns, which is advantageous for separating sensory signals from internal noise. However, studies in carnivore and primate V1, which have functional columns, have reported high similarity between stimulus-evoked and spontaneous activity. Thus, the mechanism of signal-noise separation in the columnar visual cortex may be different from that in rodents. To address this issue, we compared spontaneous and stimulus-evoked activity in marmoset V1 and higher visual areas. In marmoset V1, spontaneous and stimulus-evoked activity showed similar patterns as expected. However, in marmoset higher visual areas, spontaneous and stimulus-evoked activity were progressively orthogonalized along the cortical hierarchy, eventually reaching levels comparable to those in mouse V1. These results suggest that orthogonalization of spontaneous and stimulus-evoked activity is a general principle of cortical computation.