Dissociation of attentional state and behavioral outcome using local field potentials

Abstract

Behavioral outcome (i.e., whether a target is detected or missed) depends on attentional state and potentially other factors related to decision-making, which could in turn modulate the power and phase of neuronal oscillations. Here we investigated whether attentional state (i.e., whether attention is inside or outside the receptive fields of neurons) and behavioral outcome are distinguishable using the power and phase of local field potential (LFP) recorded from electrode arrays in area V4 of monkeys performing an attentional task under different cuing conditions. Since attention also strongly modulates pairwise measures such as spike count correlation and phase consistency which are typically measured across trials, we developed novel methods to obtain single-trial estimates of these measures. Surprisingly, while attentional location was best discriminated using gamma and high-gamma power, behavioral outcome was best discriminated by alpha power and steady-state visually evoked potential. Power outperformed absolute phase, although single-trial gamma phase consistency provided good attentional discriminability. Our results provide a clear dissociation between the neural mechanisms that regulate attentional focus and those that govern behavioral outcome.