Cirillo Rossella, Fascianelli Valeria, Ferrucci Lorenzo, Genovesio Aldo
Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Sapienza - University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, Rome 00185, Italy; Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod - UMR 5229, 67 Boulevard Pinel, Bron Cedex 69675, France.
Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Sapienza - University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, Rome 00185, Italy; PhD Program in Behavioral Neuroscience, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
iScience. 2018 Dec 21;10:203-210. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2018.11.033. Epub 2018 Nov 22.
Our brain continuously receives information over multiple timescales that are differently processed across areas. In this study, we investigated the intrinsic timescale of neurons in the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) of two rhesus macaques while performing a non-match-to-goal task. The task rule was to reject the previously chosen target and select the alternative one. We defined the intrinsic timescale as the decay constant of the autocorrelation structure computed during a baseline period of the task. We found that neurons with longer intrinsic timescale tended to maintain a stronger spatial response coding during a delay period. This result suggests that longer intrinsic timescales predict the functional role of PMd neurons in a cognitive task. Our estimate of the intrinsic timescale integrates an existing hierarchical model (Murray et al., 2014), by assigning to PMd a lower position than prefrontal cortex in the hierarchical ordering of the brain areas based on neurons' timescales.
我们的大脑在多个时间尺度上持续接收信息，这些信息在不同脑区进行不同的处理。在本研究中，我们在两只恒河猴执行非匹配目标任务时，研究了背侧运动前皮层（PMd）中神经元的固有时间尺度。任务规则是拒绝先前选择的目标并选择另一个目标。我们将固有时间尺度定义为在任务基线期计算的自相关结构的衰减常数。我们发现，固有时间尺度较长的神经元在延迟期往往保持更强的空间反应编码。这一结果表明，较长的固有时间尺度预示着PMd神经元在认知任务中的功能作用。我们对固有时间尺度的估计整合了一个现有的层次模型（Murray等人，2014年），通过在基于神经元时间尺度的脑区层次排序中，将PMd置于比前额叶皮层更低的位置。
