Modulation of Neuronal Interactions Through Neuronal Synchronization

Modulation of neuronal interactions through neuronal synchronization.

Brain processing depends on the interactions between neuronal groups. Those interactions are governed by the pattern of anatomical connections and by yet unknown mechanisms that modulate the effective strength of a given connection. We found that the mutual influence among neuronal groups depends on the phase relation between rhythmic activities within the groups. Phase relations supporting int...

Selective attention through selective neuronal synchronization

Modulation of oscillatory neuronal synchronization by selective visual attention.

In crowded visual scenes, attention is needed to select relevant stimuli. To study the underlying mechanisms, we recorded neurons in cortical area V4 while macaque monkeys attended to behaviorally relevant stimuli and ignored distracters. Neurons activated by the attended stimulus showed increased gamma-frequency (35 to 90 hertz) synchronization but reduced low-frequency (<17 hertz) synchroniza...

The neuronal basis of attention: rate versus synchronization modulation.

Extensive theoretical and experimental work on the neuronal correlates of visual attention raises two hypotheses about the underlying mechanisms. The first hypothesis, named biased competition, originates from experimental single-cell recordings that have shown that attention upmodulates the firing rates of the neurons encoding the attended features and downregulates the firing rates of the neu...

Electric field modulation of synchronization in neuronal networks

Motivated by the observation that applied electric !elds modulate hippocampal seizures, and that seizures may be asynchronous, we modeled synaptically coupled two-compartment hippocampal pyramidal neurons embedded within an electrically resistive lattice in order to examine network synchronization properties under the in4uence of externally applied electric !elds. Excitatory electric !elds were...