STN-PFC circuit related to attentional fluctuations during non-movement decision-making

Abstract

Decision-making is a cognitive process, in which participants need to attend to relevant information and ignore the irrelevant information. To identify the attention mechanism in a non-movement decision-making process, we re-analyze local field potential signals from a task, in which subjects were instructed to attend to specific numbers. Given the important role of theta and broadband high gamma (BHG) oscillations in attentional processing (Baird et al. (2014);Foster et al. (2013);Helfrich et al. (2018)). We examined theta-BHG coupling within and between dorsal posterior prefrontal cortex (dpPFC), dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and subthalamic nucleus (STN) as a function of attention states (attended or ignored). We found decreased phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) between theta and BHG during the attended trials, within each area and cross areas. Our results indicate that STN participated in attention processing for the first time, and the decreased PAC in STN and prefrontal regions between theta and BHG is a core electrophysiological mechanism that underlies selective attention allocation.