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Spatial Attention Decorrelates Intrinsic Activity Fluctuations in Macaque Area V4

2009; Cell Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.neuron.2009.09.013

1097-4199

Jude F. Mitchell, Kristy A. Sundberg, John H. Reynolds,

Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies

Attention typically amplifies neuronal responses evoked by task-relevant stimuli while attenuating responses to task-irrelevant distracters. In this context, visual distracters constitute an external source of noise that is diminished to improve attended signal quality. Activity that is internal to the cortex itself, stimulus-independent ongoing correlated fluctuations in firing, might also act as task-irrelevant noise. To examine this, we recorded from area V4 of macaques performing an attention-demanding task. The firing of neurons to identically repeated stimuli was highly variable. Much of this variability originates from ongoing low-frequency (<5 Hz) fluctuations in rate correlated across the neuronal population. When attention is directed to a stimulus inside a neuron's receptive field, these correlated fluctuations in rate are reduced. This attention-dependent reduction of ongoing cortical activity improves the signal-to-noise ratio of pooled neural signals substantially more than attention-dependent increases in firing rate.