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J Neurophysiol (July 12, 2006). doi:10.1152/jn.00059.2006
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Submitted on January 18, 2006
Accepted on May 3, 2006

Properties of correlated neural activity clusters in cat auditory cortex resemble those of neural assemblies

Jos J Eggermont1*

1 Physiology and Biophysics,Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: eggermon{at}ucalgary.ca.

Spiking activity was recorded from cat auditory cortex using multi-electrode arrays. Cross-correlograms were calculated for spikes recorded on separate microelectrodes. The pair-wise cross-correlation matrix was constructed for the peak values of the correlograms. Hierarchical clustering was performed on the cross-correlation matrix for six stimulus conditions. These were silence, three multi-tone stimulus ensembles with different spectral densities, low-pass amplitude-modulated noise, and Poisson-distributed click trains that each lasted 15 minutes. The resulting neuron clusters reflect patches in cortex of up to several mm2 in size that expand and contract in response to different stimuli.Cluster positions and size were very similar for spontaneous activity and multi-tone stimulus-evoked activity, but differed between those conditions and the noise and click stimuli. Cluster size was significantly larger in posterior auditory field (PAF) compared to primary auditory cortex (AI), whereas the fraction of common spikes (within a 10 ms window) across all electrode activity participating in a cluster was significantly higher in AI compared to PAF. Clusters crossed area boundaries in less than 5% of the cases were simultaneous recording were made in AI and PAF. Clusters are therefore similar to but not synonymous with the traditional view of neural assemblies. Common-spike spectro-temporal receptive fields (STRFs) were obtained for common-spike activity and all-spike activity within a cluster. Common-spike STRFs had higher signal-to-noise ratio than all-spike STRFs and showed generally spectral and temporal sharpening. The coincident and non-coincident output of the clusters could potentially act in parallel and may serve different modes of stimulus coding.




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B. Gourevitch and J. J. Eggermont
Evaluating Information Transfer Between Auditory Cortical Neurons
J Neurophysiol, March 1, 2007; 97(3): 2533 - 2543.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]




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