Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Suwon, 16419, Republic of Korea.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, 16419, Republic of Korea.
Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 3;13(1):2012. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-29310-8.
In a dynamic environment, we seek to enhance behavioral responses by anticipating future events. Previous studies have shown that the probability distribution of the timing of future events could shape our expectation of event timing; furthermore, the modulation of alpha oscillation is known to be a critical neural factor. However, a link between the modulation of alpha oscillation by temporal expectation and single neural activity is missing. In this study, we investigated how temporal expectation modulated frontal neural activities and behavioral reaction time by recording neural activity from the frontal eye field smooth pursuit eye movement region of monkeys while they performed a smooth pursuit eye movement task. We found that the temporal expectation reduced the coherence between the neural spiking and alpha frequency of the local field potential, along with the trial-by-trial correlation between the neural spiking activity and pursuit latency. This result suggests that the desynchronization of alpha oscillation by temporal expectation would be related to the decorrelation of population neural activity, which could be the neural source of reaction time enhancement by temporal expectation.
在动态环境中，我们试图通过预测未来事件来增强行为反应。先前的研究表明，未来事件时间的概率分布可以塑造我们对事件时间的预期；此外，alpha 振荡的调制被认为是一个关键的神经因素。然而，由时间预期引起的 alpha 振荡调制与单个神经元活动之间的联系尚不清楚。在这项研究中，我们通过记录猴子的额眼区平滑追随眼动区域的神经活动，在猴子进行平滑追随眼动任务时，研究了时间预期如何调节额部神经活动和行为反应时间。我们发现，时间预期降低了神经尖峰和局部场电位的 alpha 频率之间的相干性，以及神经尖峰活动和追随潜伏期之间的试验间相关性。这一结果表明，alpha 振荡的时间预期去同步可能与群体神经活动的去相关有关，这可能是时间预期增强反应时间的神经源。
