Synchronization of Neuronal Activity during Stimulus Expectation in a Direction Discrimination Task

The dorsal pathway of the primate brain, especially the middle temporal area (MT or V5) and the superior middle temporal area (MST or V5a), is strongly involved in motion detection. The relation between neural firing rates and psychophysical performance has led to the assumption that the neural code used by these areas consists of the relative discharge rates of neuronal populations. As an additional neural code, temporal correlation of neural activity has been suggested. Our study addresses the involvement of such a code in awake monkeys performing a motion discrimination task. We found significant temporal correlations between simultaneously recorded pairs of units in areas MT and MST and other extrastriate cortical areas. Units recorded from the same electrode were more frequently synchronized than units recorded from different electrodes placed within the same or different cortical areas. Activity synchronization was present in the expectation period before stimulus presentation and could not be induced de novo by the stimulus. Rather, we found a contrast-dependent reduction of correlation strength on stimulus onset. Correlation strength did not vary systematically with stimulus directions. We conclude that under the conditions of this study, temporal decorrelation of MT and MST neurons could be used to detect the stimulus, but synchronization does not convey specific information about its direction of motion and therefore is unlikely to contribute to performance in our direction discrimination task. Activity synchronization in the period before stimulus onset could be related to attentive expectation.