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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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"Corticocortical Communication"
Adam Kohn, Ph.D.
Professor, Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience
Professor, Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences
Professor, Department of Systems & Computational Biology
Isidor Tachna Professor in Ophthalmology
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Most brain functions involve neuronal population activity that is distributed across multiple areas. The routing of signals through this distributed network is flexible, changing from moment-to-moment to meet task demands. To determine how flexible cortical communication could be instantiated, we recorded spiking activity of neuronal populations across several stages of the macaque cortical visual stream. Using dimensionality reduction methods, we find that inter-areal interactions occur through a communication subspace: downstream fluctuations are related to a small subset of source population activity patterns. Subspaces for feedforward and feedback interactions appear distinct. We propose that the communication subspace may be a general, population-level mechanism by which activity can be selectively and flexibly routed across brain areas.
