Tuning of the neocortex to the temporal dynamics of attended event streams
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1
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, United States
When events occur in rhythmic streams, attention may use the entrainment of neocortical excitability fluctuations (oscillations) to the tempo of a task-relevant stream, to promote its perceptual selection, and its representation in working memory. To test this idea, we studied humans and monkeys using an auditory-visual stream selection paradigm. Electrocortical (ECoG) activity sampled from subdural electrodes in epilepsy patients showed that: 1) attentional modulation of oscillatory entrainment operates in a network of areas including auditory, visual, posterior parietal, inferior motor, inferior frontal, cingulate and superior midline frontal cortex, 2) strength of oscillatory entrainment depends on the predictability of the stimulus stream, and 3) these effects are dissociable from attentional enhancement of evoked activity. Fine-grained intracortical analysis of laminar current source density profiles and concomitant neuronal firing patterns in monkeys showed that: 1) along with responses “driven” by preferred modality stimuli (e.g., visual stimuli in V1), attended non-preferred modality stimuli (e.g., auditory stimuli in V1) could “modulate” local cortical excitability by entraining ongoing oscillatory activity, 2) while this “heteromodal” entrainment occurred in the extragranular layers, the granular layers remain phase-locked to the stimulus stream in the preferred modality. Thus, attention may use phase modulation (coherence vs opposition) to control the projection of information from input to output layers of cortex. On a regional scale, oscillatory entrainment across a network of brain regions to may provide a mechanism for a sustained and distributed neural representation of attended event patterns, and for their availability to working memory.
Keywords:
ECoG,
working memory
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Symposium: Oral Presentation
Topic:
Symposium 19: The relationship between attention and working memory
Citation:
Schroeder
CE
(2011). Tuning of the neocortex to the temporal dynamics of attended event streams.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00580
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Received:
14 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
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Correspondence:
Dr. Charles E Schroeder, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, United States, schrod@nki.rfmh.org