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Spontaneously emerging cortical representations of visual attributes

Nature volume 425, pages 954–956 (2003)Cite this article

Abstract

Spontaneous cortical activity—ongoing activity in the absence of intentional sensory input—has been studied extensively1, using methods ranging from EEG (electroencephalography)2,3,4, through voltage sensitive dye imaging5,6,7, down to recordings from single neurons8,9. Ongoing cortical activity has been shown to play a critical role in development10,11,12,13,14, and must also be essential for processing sensory perception, because it modulates stimulus-evoked activity5,15,16, and is correlated with behaviour17. Yet its role in the processing of external information and its relationship to internal representations of sensory attributes remains unknown. Using voltage sensitive dye imaging, we previously established a close link between ongoing activity in the visual cortex of anaesthetized cats and the spontaneous firing of a single neuron6. Here we report that such activity encompasses a set of dynamically switching cortical states, many of which correspond closely to orientation maps. When such an orientation state emerged spontaneously, it spanned several hypercolumns and was often followed by a state corresponding to a proximal orientation. We suggest that dynamically switching cortical states could represent the brain's internal context, and therefore reflect or influence memory, perception and behaviour.

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Figure 1: Comparing instantaneous patterns of spontaneous and evoked activity to the averaged functional map.
Figure 2: Spontaneously emerging orientation states.
Figure 3: Dynamics of ongoing activity.
Figure 4: Spontaneous states revealed using a Kohonen algorithm.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Aertsen, N. Tishbi, R. Malach and J. M. Herrmann for discussions and insights, R. Hildesheim for the dyes, B. Blumenfeld for his suggestion for the orientation preference map in Fig. 4B, and D. Etner and Y. Toledo for technical assistance. This work was supported by grants from the Israeli Science Foundation, Grodetsky Center and Irving B. Harris Foundation (to M.T.), the Grodetsky Center, the Korber and Israeli Science foundations and the BMBF/MOS (to A.G.) and the Minerva Foundation (to D.B.).

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  1. Tal Kenet

    Present address: Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences, University of California San Francisco, 513 Parnassus Avenue, Box 0732, San Francisco, California, 94143, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurobiology, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel

    Tal Kenet, Dmitri Bibitchkov, Misha Tsodyks, Amiram Grinvald & Amos Arieli

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Correspondence to Tal Kenet.

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Kenet, T., Bibitchkov, D., Tsodyks, M. et al. Spontaneously emerging cortical representations of visual attributes. Nature 425, 954–956 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02078

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