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Relating Temporal Properties of Spike Trains from Area MT Neurons to the Behavior of the Monkey

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Temporal Coding in the Brain

Part of the book series: Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences ((NEUROSCIENCE))

Summary

We investigated the temporal fine structure of spike trains recorded in extrastriate area MT of the trained macaque monkey. The data were recorded previously (Britten et al. 1992) while the monkey performed a near-threshold direction discrimination task so that both physiological and psychophysical data could be obtained on the same set of trials. We identified bursting cells and quantified their properties in relation to the behavior of the animal.

We computed the power spectrum and the distribution of interspikeintervals (ISI) associated with individual spike trains from 212 cells, averaging these quanties across similar trials. One third of the cells have a relatively flat power spectrum with a dip at low temporal frequencies, compatible with a Poisson process with refractory period. About two thirds of the cells have a peak in the 20-60 Hz frequency band. This peak strongly correlates with a tendency of the cell to respond in bursts, i.e., 2–4 spikes within 2–8 msec. For 93 % of cells, the shape of the power spectrum did not change dramatically with stimulus conditions. The ISI distribution and power spectrum of bursting cells are compatible with the notion that these cells fire Poisson distributed bursts, with a burst-related refractory period. We found no statistically significant relationship between the peak in the power spectrum and psychophysical measures of the monkeys’ performance. Using signal detection theory, we show that, for bursting cells, the “event” rate—where an event is either a single burst of spikes or an isolated spike—is on average a more sensitive measure of visual stimulus direction than the total number of spikes, used previously (Britten et al. 1992), implying that the number of spikes in a burst is less stimulus-dependent than theoverall firing rate or the rate of bursts.

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Authors
  1. W. Bair
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  2. C. Koch
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  3. W. Newsome
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  4. K. Britten
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University, 197 University Avenue, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA

    G. Buzsáki Ph. D.

  2. Department of Physiology and Biophysics, New York University Medical Center, 550 First Avenue, New York, NY, 10016, USA

    R. Llinás Ph.D.

  3. Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Deutschordenstr. 46, D-60528, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

    W. Singer Ph.D.

  4. Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Perception et de l’Action, Collège de France-CNRS, 15, rue de l’Ecole de Medecine, F-75270, Paris Cedex 06, France

    A. Berthoz Ph. D.

  5. Fondation IPSEN, 24, rue Erlanger, F-75016, Paris, France

    Y. Christen Ph. D.

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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Bair, W., Koch, C., Newsome, W., Britten, K. (1994). Relating Temporal Properties of Spike Trains from Area MT Neurons to the Behavior of the Monkey. In: Buzsáki, G., Llinás, R., Singer, W., Berthoz, A., Christen, Y. (eds) Temporal Coding in the Brain. Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-85148-3_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-85148-3_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-85150-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-85148-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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