Predicting Grating Orientations With Cross-Frequency Coupling and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator in V1 and V4 of Rhesus Monkeys.

Liyong Yin,Youben Xiao,Yue Du,Zhaohui Li

doi:10.3389/fncom.2020.605104

Abstract

Orientation selectivity, as an emergent property of neurons in the visual cortex, is of critical importance in the processing of visual information. Characterizing the orientation selectivity based on neuronal firing activities or local field potentials (LFPs) is a hot topic of current research. In this paper, we used cross-frequency coupling and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) to predict the grating orientations in V1 and V4 of two rhesus monkeys. The experimental data were recorded by utilizing two chronically implanted multi-electrode arrays, which were placed, respectively, in V1 and V4 of two rhesus monkeys performing a selective visual attention task. The phase–amplitude coupling (PAC) and amplitude–amplitude coupling (AAC) were employed to characterize the cross-frequency coupling of LFPs under sinusoidal grating stimuli with different orientations. Then, a LASSO logistic regression model was constructed to predict the grating orientation based on the strength of PAC and AAC. Moreover, the cross-validation method was used to evaluate the performance of the model. It was found that the average accuracy of the prediction based on the combination of PAC and AAC was 73.9%, which was higher than the predicting accuracy with PAC or AAC separately. In conclusion, a LASSO logistic regression model was introduced in this study, which can predict the grating orientations with relatively high accuracy by using PAC and AAC together. Our results suggest that the principle behind the LASSO model is probably an alternative direction to explore the mechanism for generating orientation selectivity.

Highlights

Orientation is a basic and important characteristic of natural images
By measuring the dynamics of orientation tuning of single neurons in the V1 cortex of macaque monkeys, it was found that orientation selectivity is generated mainly by both tuned enhancement and global suppression (Shapley et al, 2003); orientation selectivity is similar for lateral geniculate nucleus relay cells spiking and subthreshold input to V1 neurons, indicating that cortical orientation selectivity is inherited from the lateral geniculate nucleus in mouse (Scholl et al, 2013); both the preferred orientation and the width of orientation tuning were well-predicted by a feedforward model of orientation selectivity, which was constructed based on simple cells in the cat visual cortex (Lampl et al, 2001)
Before constructing the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) model, it is necessary to investigate the correlation between the cross-frequency coupling (PAC and amplitude–amplitude coupling (AAC) of the local field potentials (LFPs)) and the grating orientation in V1 and V4

Summary

Introduction

Orientation is a basic and important characteristic of natural images. The detection of oriented stimuli is generally known as orientation selectivity, i.e., neurons respond preferentially to elongated stimuli oriented along a specific axis in the visual field but respond weakly to stimuli oriented orthogonally to their preferred axis (Antinucci et al, 2016). Orientation Selectivity of Rhesus Monkeys numerous studies investigated the orientation selectivity in visual systems of vertebrates and invertebrates, such as rodents (Niell and Stryker, 2008), primates (Hubel and Wiesel, 1968; Fisher et al, 2015), fish (Nikolaou et al, 2012), and insects (Fisher et al, 2015). It plays a key role in shape perception and other visual information processing (Mansfield, 1974; Girshick et al, 2011; Lien and Scanziani, 2018; Crijns et al, 2019). We used some features extracted from neural oscillations to characterize the orientation selectivity

Methods

Results

Conclusion