reduced variability of ongoing and evoked cortical activity leads to improved behavioral performance减少变化正在进行的和诱发皮层活动导致性能改进的行为.pdfVIP

Reduced Variability of Ongoing and Evoked Cortical Activity Leads to Improved Behavioral Performance 1 2 3 4 Anders Ledberg *, Anna Montagnini , Richard Coppola , Steven L. Bressler 1 Center of Brain and Cognition, Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, 2 Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France, 3 Clinical Brain Disorders Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America, 4 Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, United States of America Abstract Sensory responses of the brain are known to be highly variable, but the origin and functional relevance of this variability have long remained enigmatic. Using the variable foreperiod of a visual discrimination task to assess variability in the primate cerebral cortex, we report that visual evoked response variability is not only tied to variability in ongoing cortical activity, but also predicts mean response time. We used cortical local field potentials, simultaneously recorded from widespread cortical areas, to gauge both ongoing and visually evoked activity. Trial-to-trial variability of sensory evoked responses was strongly modulated by foreperiod duration and correlated both with the cortical variability before stimulus onset as well as with response times. In a separate set of experiments we probed the relation between small saccadic eye movements, foreperiod duration and manual response times. The rate of eye movements was modulated by foreperiod duration and eye position variability was positively correlated with