Coherent alpha oscillations link current and future receptive fields during saccades

Abstract

Oscillations are ubiquitous in the brain, and they can powerfully influence neural coding. In particular, when oscillations at distinct sites are coherent, they provide a means of gating the flow of neural signals between different cortical regions. Coherent oscillations also occur within individual brain regions, although the purpose of this coherence is not well understood. Here, we report that within a single brain region, coherent alpha oscillations link stimulus representations as they change in space and time. Specifically, in primate cortical area V4, alpha coherence links sites that encode the retinal location of a visual stimulus before and after a saccade. These coherence changes exhibit properties similar to those of receptive field remapping, a phenomenon in which individual neurons change their receptive fields according to the metrics of each saccade. In particular, alpha coherence, like remapping, is highly dependent on the saccade vector and the spatial arrangement of current and future receptive fields. Moreover, although visual stimulation plays a modulatory role, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to elicit alpha coherence. Indeed, a similar pattern of coherence is observed even when saccades are made in darkness. Together, these results show that the pattern of alpha coherence across the retinotopic map in V4 matches many of the properties of receptive field remapping. Thus, oscillatory coherence might play a role in constructing the stable representation of visual space that is an essential aspect of conscious perception.communication through coherence | remapping | alpha frequency | saccades | V4

Roles of Brain Criticality and Multiscale Oscillations in Temporal Predictions for Sensorimotor Processing

“…Importantly, as in intrinsic perceptual/ attentional sampling, the phase of presaccade theta oscillations per se predicts the perceptual magnitude of perisaccadic mislocalization [50], and the phase of alpha oscillations (saccadic reaction times) [22]. Saccades are followed by precisely timed synchronous discharges [51] and pronounced changes in oscillatory activity in the visual system [46,52,53]. As a result, each fixation onset is rapidly followed by enhanced neuronal responsiveness and phase alignment among neuronal oscillations, especially in the theta band, as shown for instance in V1 and in the hippocampus [52,54].…”

Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention

“…Forward remapping offered an excellent candidate mechanism of space constancy which was incorporated into such phenomenon models. In these models, connections between visual neurons with receptive fields spatially separated by the saccade vector can be used to predict post-saccadic visual stimulus location and compensate for retinal image shifts during the saccade [27][28][29] . However, forward remapping models have been challenged by Zirnsak and colleagues 15 , whose results suggested that the early findings have been affected by the low spatial resolution of receptive field mapping technique [11][12][13] .…”

Predictive visuo-motor communication through neural oscillations

“…In this view, the function of the modulation is not to eliminate unstable visual signals collected when sensors move or attention is allocated to moving effectors but, rather, part of a cyclic mechanism of temporal binding. Intentional binding signals have been repeatedly observed in monkeys' V1 cortex and may serve important functions in perception (Engel and Singer, 2001;Fries, 2015;Neupane et al, 2017). One of these functions may be related to modulation of temporal integration or temporal segmentation of the visual processing, as demonstrated in V1 during saccade in an MEG study (Wutz et al, 2016).…”