title: Patterns of ongoing activity and the functional architecture of the primary visual cortex.
abstract: Ongoing spontaneous activity in the cerebral cortex exhibits complex spatiotemporal patterns in the absence of sensory stimuli. To elucidate the nature of this ongoing activity, we present a theoretical treatment of two contrasting scenarios of cortical dynamics: (1) fluctuations about a single background state and (2) wandering among multiple "attractor" states, which encode a single or several stimulus features. Studying simplified network rate models of the primary visual cortex (V1), we show that the single state scenario is characterized by fast and high-dimensional Gaussian-like fluctuations, whereas in the multiple state scenario the fluctuations are slow, low dimensional, and highly non-Gaussian. Studying a more realistic model that incorporates correlations in the feed-forward input, spatially restricted cortical interactions, and an experimentally derived layout of pinwheels, we show that recent optical-imaging data of ongoing activity in V1 are consistent with the presence of either a single background state or multiple attractor states encoding many features.
authors.affiliation: Racah Institute of Physics and The Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel. jgoldberg@utsa.edu
authors.forename: Joshua A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Goldberg
authors.forename: Uri
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Rokni
authors.forename: Haim
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sompolinsky
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D016011:Normal Distribution; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*