title: Timescales of multineuronal activity patterns reflect temporal structure of visual stimuli.
abstract: The investigation of distributed coding across multiple neurons in the cortex remains to this date a challenge. Our current understanding of collective encoding of information and the relevant timescales is still limited. Most results are restricted to disparate timescales, focused on either very fast, e.g., spike-synchrony, or slow timescales, e.g., firing rate. Here, we investigated systematically multineuronal activity patterns evolving on different timescales, spanning the whole range from spike-synchrony to mean firing rate. Using multi-electrode recordings from cat visual cortex, we show that cortical responses can be described as trajectories in a high-dimensional pattern space. Patterns evolve on a continuum of coexisting timescales that strongly relate to the temporal properties of stimuli. Timescales consistent with the time constants of neuronal membranes and fast synaptic transmission (5-20 ms) play a particularly salient role in encoding a large amount of stimulus-related information. Thus, to faithfully encode the properties of visual stimuli the brain engages multiple neurons into activity patterns evolving on multiple timescales.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurophysiology, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany.
authors.forename: Ovidiu F
authors.initials: OF
authors.lastname: Jurjuţ
authors.forename: Danko
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Nikolić
authors.forename: Wolf
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Singer
authors.forename: Shan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Martha N
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Havenith
authors.forename: Raul C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Mureşan
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002415:Cats; D009474:Neurons / Q000166:cytology*; D010507:Periodicity; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013997:Time Factors; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology