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Lowe KA, Zinke W, Cosman JD, Schall JD. Frontal eye fields in macaque monkeys: prefrontal and premotor contributions to visually guided saccades. Cereb Cortex 2022; 32:5083-5107. [PMID: 35176752 PMCID: PMC9989351 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhab533] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/13/2021] [Revised: 12/15/2021] [Accepted: 12/16/2021] [Indexed: 12/27/2022] Open
Abstract
Neuronal spiking was sampled from the frontal eye field (FEF) and from the rostral part of area 6 that reaches to the superior limb of the arcuate sulcus, dorsal to the arcuate spur when present (F2vr) in macaque monkeys performing memory-guided saccades and visually guided saccades for visual search. Neuronal spiking modulation in F2vr resembled that in FEF in many but not all respects. A new consensus clustering algorithm of neuronal modulation patterns revealed that F2vr and FEF contain a greater variety of modulation patterns than previously reported. The areas differ in the proportions of visuomotor neuron types, the proportions of neurons discriminating a target from distractors during visual search, and the consistency of modulation patterns across tasks. However, between F2vr and FEF we found no difference in the magnitude of delay period activity, the timing of the peak discharge rate relative to saccades, or the time of search target selection. The observed similarities and differences between the 2 cortical regions contribute to other work establishing the organization of eye fields in the frontal lobe and may help explain why FEF in monkeys is identified within granular prefrontal area 8 but in humans is identified within agranular premotor area 6.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kaleb A Lowe
- Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, Vanderbilt Vision Research Center
| | - Wolf Zinke
- Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, Vanderbilt Vision Research Center
| | - Joshua D Cosman
- Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, Vanderbilt Vision Research Center
| | - Jeffrey D Schall
- Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience, Vanderbilt Vision Research Center
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Heusser MR, Bourrelly C, Gandhi NJ. Decoding the Time Course of Spatial Information from Spiking and Local Field Potential Activities in the Superior Colliculus. eNeuro 2022; 9:ENEURO.0347-22.2022. [PMID: 36379711 PMCID: PMC9718355 DOI: 10.1523/eneuro.0347-22.2022] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/28/2022] [Revised: 10/31/2022] [Accepted: 11/05/2022] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
Place code representation is ubiquitous in circuits that encode spatial parameters. For visually guided eye movements, neurons in many brain regions emit spikes when a stimulus is presented in their receptive fields and/or when a movement is directed into their movement fields. Crucially, individual neurons respond for a broad range of directions or eccentricities away from the optimal vector, making it difficult to decode the stimulus location or the saccade vector from each cell's activity. We investigated whether it is possible to decode the spatial parameter with a population-level analysis, even when the optimal vectors are similar across neurons. Spiking activity and local field potentials (LFPs) in the superior colliculus (SC) were recorded with a laminar probe as monkeys performed a delayed saccade task to one of eight targets radially equidistant in direction. A classifier was applied offline to decode the spatial configuration as the trial progresses from sensation to action. For spiking activity, decoding performance across all eight directions was highest during the visual and motor epochs and lower but well above chance during the delay period. Classification performance followed a similar pattern for LFP activity too, except the performance during the delay period was limited mostly to the preferred direction. Increasing the number of neurons in the population consistently increased classifier performance for both modalities. Overall, this study demonstrates the power of population activity for decoding spatial information not possible from individual neurons.
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Affiliation(s)
- Michelle R Heusser
- Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
- Center for Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
| | - Clara Bourrelly
- Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
- Center for Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
| | - Neeraj J Gandhi
- Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
- Center for Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
- Department of Neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
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Johnston R, Snyder AC, Khanna SB, Issar D, Smith MA. The eyes reflect an internal cognitive state hidden in the population activity of cortical neurons. Cereb Cortex 2022; 32:3331-3346. [PMID: 34963140 PMCID: PMC9340396 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhab418] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/07/2020] [Revised: 10/19/2021] [Accepted: 10/20/2021] [Indexed: 01/01/2023] Open
Abstract
Decades of research have shown that global brain states such as arousal can be indexed by measuring the properties of the eyes. The spiking responses of neurons throughout the brain have been associated with the pupil, small fixational saccades, and vigor in eye movements, but it has been difficult to isolate how internal states affect the eyes, and vice versa. While recording from populations of neurons in the visual and prefrontal cortex (PFC), we recently identified a latent dimension of neural activity called "slow drift," which appears to reflect a shift in a global brain state. Here, we asked if slow drift is correlated with the action of the eyes in distinct behavioral tasks. We recorded from visual cortex (V4) while monkeys performed a change detection task, and PFC, while they performed a memory-guided saccade task. In both tasks, slow drift was associated with the size of the pupil and the microsaccade rate, two external indicators of the internal state of the animal. These results show that metrics related to the action of the eyes are associated with a dominant and task-independent mode of neural activity that can be accessed in the population activity of neurons across the cortex.
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Affiliation(s)
- Richard Johnston
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
- Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
| | - Adam C Snyder
- Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA
- Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14642, USA
- Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14627, USA
| | - Sanjeev B Khanna
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
- Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15261, USA
| | - Deepa Issar
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
| | - Matthew A Smith
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
- Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
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Jia J, Puyang Z, Wang Q, Jin X, Chen A. Dynamic encoding of saccade sequences in primate frontal eye field. J Physiol 2021; 599:5061-5084. [PMID: 34555188 DOI: 10.1113/jp282094] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/29/2021] [Accepted: 09/20/2021] [Indexed: 11/08/2022] Open
Abstract
The frontal eye field (FEF) is a key part of the oculomotor system, with dominant responses to the direction of single saccades. However, whether and how FEF contributes to sequential saccades remain largely unknown. By training rhesus monkeys to perform saccade sequences, we found sequence-related activities in FEF neurons, whose selectivity to saccade direction undergoes dynamic changes during sequential vs. single saccades. These sequence-related activities are context-dependent, exhibiting different firing activities during memory- vs. visually guided sequences. When the monkey was performing the sequential saccade task, the thresholds of microstimulation to evoke saccades in FEF were increased and the percentage of the successfully induced saccades was significantly reduced compared with the fixation condition. Pharmacological inactivation of FEF impaired the monkey's performance of previously learned sequential saccades, with different effects on the same actions depending on its position within the sequence. These results reveal the context-dependent, sequence-specific dynamic encoding of saccades in FEF, and underscore the crucial role of FEF in the planning and execution of sequential saccades. KEY POINTS: FEF neurons respond differently during sequential vs. single saccades Sequence-related FEF activity is context-dependent The microstimulation threshold in FEF was increased during the sequential task but the evoked saccade did not alter the sequence structure FEF inactivation severely impaired the performance of sequential saccades.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jing Jia
- Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
| | - Zhen Puyang
- Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
| | - Qingjun Wang
- Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
| | - Xin Jin
- Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.,Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA.,Center for Motor Control and Disease, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.,NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science, New York University Shanghai, Shanghai, China
| | - Aihua Chen
- Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
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Amengual JL, Ben Hamed S. Revisiting Persistent Neuronal Activity During Covert Spatial Attention. Front Neural Circuits 2021; 15:679796. [PMID: 34276314 PMCID: PMC8278237 DOI: 10.3389/fncir.2021.679796] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/12/2021] [Accepted: 06/03/2021] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Persistent activity has been observed in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), in particular during the delay periods of visual attention tasks. Classical approaches based on the average activity over multiple trials have revealed that such an activity encodes the information about the attentional instruction provided in such tasks. However, single-trial approaches have shown that activity in this area is rather sparse than persistent and highly heterogeneous not only within the trials but also between the different trials. Thus, this observation raised the question of how persistent the actually persistent attention-related prefrontal activity is and how it contributes to spatial attention. In this paper, we review recent evidence of precisely deconstructing the persistence of the neural activity in the PFC in the context of attention orienting. The inclusion of machine-learning methods for decoding the information reveals that attention orienting is a highly dynamic process, possessing intrinsic oscillatory dynamics working at multiple timescales spanning from milliseconds to minutes. Dimensionality reduction methods further show that this persistent activity dynamically incorporates multiple sources of information. This novel framework reflects a high complexity in the neural representation of the attention-related information in the PFC, and how its computational organization predicts behavior.
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Affiliation(s)
- Julian L Amengual
- Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, CNRS UMR 5229, Université Claude Bernard Lyon I, 67 Boulevard Pinel, Bron, France
| | - Suliann Ben Hamed
- Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, CNRS UMR 5229, Université Claude Bernard Lyon I, 67 Boulevard Pinel, Bron, France
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Cowley BR, Snyder AC, Acar K, Williamson RC, Yu BM, Smith MA. Slow Drift of Neural Activity as a Signature of Impulsivity in Macaque Visual and Prefrontal Cortex. Neuron 2020; 108:551-567.e8. [PMID: 32810433 PMCID: PMC7822647 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2020.07.021] [Citation(s) in RCA: 49] [Impact Index Per Article: 12.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/17/2020] [Revised: 06/15/2020] [Accepted: 07/17/2020] [Indexed: 12/22/2022]
Abstract
An animal's decision depends not only on incoming sensory evidence but also on its fluctuating internal state. This state embodies multiple cognitive factors, such as arousal and fatigue, but it is unclear how these factors influence the neural processes that encode sensory stimuli and form a decision. We discovered that, unprompted by task conditions, animals slowly shifted their likelihood of detecting stimulus changes over the timescale of tens of minutes. Neural population activity from visual area V4, as well as from prefrontal cortex, slowly drifted together with these behavioral fluctuations. We found that this slow drift, rather than altering the encoding of the sensory stimulus, acted as an impulsivity signal, overriding sensory evidence to dictate the final decision. Overall, this work uncovers an internal state embedded in population activity across multiple brain areas and sheds further light on how internal states contribute to the decision-making process.
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Affiliation(s)
- Benjamin R Cowley
- Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA; Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Department of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
| | - Adam C Snyder
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14642, USA; Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14642, USA; Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14642, USA
| | - Katerina Acar
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Center for Neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
| | - Ryan C Williamson
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Department of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
| | - Byron M Yu
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
| | - Matthew A Smith
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; Department of Ophthalmology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
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