Abstract
Perception reflects not only sensory inputs, but also the endogenous state when these inputs enter the brain. Prior studies show that endogenous neural states influence stimulus processing through non-specific, global mechanisms, such as spontaneous fluctuations of arousal. It is unclear if endogenous activity influences circuit and stimulus-specific processing and behavior as well. Here we use intracranial recordings from 30 pre-surgical epilepsy patients to show that patterns of endogenous activity are related to the strength of trial-by-trial neural tuning in different visual category-selective neural circuits. The same aspects of the endogenous activity that relate to tuning in a particular neural circuit also correlate to behavioral reaction times only for stimuli from the category that circuit is selective for. These results suggest that endogenous activity can modulate neural tuning and influence behavior in a circuit- and stimulus-specific manner, reflecting a potential mechanism by which endogenous neural states facilitate and bias perception.
Highlights
Perception reflects sensory inputs, and the endogenous state when these inputs enter the brain
The auto-correlation of modulation index (MI) across consecutive trials for each electrode was computed, and 40 out of the 246 electrodes (~15%) showed significant auto-correlation across trials at p < 0.05 uncorrected level (Fig. 4). While this is significantly more than would be expected by chance, it is a relatively small subset of the electrodes, suggesting that there is a mix of infra-slow and transient effects in the pre-stimulus activity, with transient effects being the dominant proportion. These results demonstrate that pre-stimulus activity modulates the degree of category tuning on the trial-by-trial basis in category-selective areas of the cortex
The results here demonstrate that pre-stimulus activity modulates the post-stimulus activity in the regions that are selective for the stimulus being viewed
Summary
Perception reflects sensory inputs, and the endogenous state when these inputs enter the brain. Prior studies show that endogenous neural states influence stimulus processing through non-specific, global mechanisms, such as spontaneous fluctuations of arousal. It is unclear if endogenous activity influences circuit and stimulus-specific processing and behavior as well. The same aspects of the endogenous activity that relate to tuning in a particular neural circuit correlate to behavioral reaction times only for stimuli from the category that circuit is selective for These results suggest that endogenous activity can modulate neural tuning and influence behavior in a circuit- and stimulus-specific manner, reflecting a potential mechanism by which endogenous neural states facilitate and bias perception. (1) pre-stimulus activity modulates the decoding accuracy in response to visual stimuli; (2) the same aspect of the pre-stimulus activity that modulates decoding accuracy correlates with behavioral perception in a region-by-stimulus specific manner, where endogenous activity in regions selective for a particular stimulus will only correlate with behavior for that stimulus
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