Spectrotemporal signatures of driving- and modulatory circuits across cortical and subcortical networks

Sensory processing depends on interactions between neural circuits that convey and regulate information across cortical and subcortical networks. Classical frameworks distinguish driving inputs, which transmit sensory content via suprathreshold activation, from modulatory inputs, which alter neuronal excitability without directly eliciting spiking. However, physiological signatures of these circuit types that generalize widely across distributed brain regions remain unclear.

We functionally differentiated driving and modulatory circuits in the awake macaque brain by jointly quantifying suprathreshold multiunit activity (MUA) and oscillatory phase coherence (inter-trial coherence, ITC) across eight cortical and thalamic structures during auditory, visual, and eye-movement conditions.

Preferred sensory stimuli elicited broadband ITC increases accompanied by robust MUA, yielding relatively uniform spectral distributions across adjacent frequency bands, consistent with driving inputs. In contrast, non-preferred sensory and eye-movement related events produced narrowband, frequency-specific ITC modulation without concurrent firing, characterized by dominant peaks at stimulation or event rates, consistent with modulatory inputs. These two response types were observed within individual regions, revealing two separable modes of neural activity.

This narrowband ITC modulation is indicative of coordinated phase alignment, capable of dynamically regulating information transfer mediated by driving inputs across thalamocortical circuits. These findings identify distinct spectrotemporal signatures of driving and modulatory circuit properties across cortical and thalamic levels and demonstrate that subthreshold oscillatory modulation is a widespread phenomenon reflecting cross-modal and saccadic-related influences on neural excitability.