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Article
Nature Neuroscience  5, 805 - 811 (2002)
Published online: 22 July 2002; | doi:10.1038/nn890

Temporal structure in neuronal activity during working memory in macaque parietal cortex

Bijan Pesaran1, John S. Pezaris2, 3, Maneesh Sahani2, 4, Partha P. Mitra5 & Richard A. Andersen2, 6

1  Division of Physics, Mathematics & Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA

2  Computation and Neural Systems Program, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA

3  Present address: Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA

4  Present address: Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR, UK

5  Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974, USA

6  Division of Biology, Mail Code 216-76, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA

Correspondence should be addressed to Richard A. Andersen andersen@vis.caltech.edu
Many cortical structures have elevated firing rates during working memory, but it is not known how the activity is maintained. To investigate whether reverberating activity is important, we studied the temporal structure of local field potential (LFP) activity and spiking from area LIP in two awake macaques during a memory-saccade task. Using spectral analysis, we found spatially tuned elevated power in the gamma band (25−90 Hz) in LFP and spiking activity during the memory period. Spiking and LFP activity were also coherent in the gamma band but not at lower frequencies. Finally, we decoded LFP activity on a single-trial basis and found that LFP activity in parietal cortex discriminated between preferred and anti-preferred direction with approximately the same accuracy as the spike rate and predicted the time of a planned movement with better accuracy than the spike rate. This finding could accelerate the development of a cortical neural prosthesis.

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Nature Neuroscience
ISSN: 1097-6256
EISSN: 1546-1726
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