Top-Down Modulation of Lateral Interactions in Visual Cortex

The primary visual cortex (V1) changes its computation according to the perceptual task being performed. We propose that this cognitive modulation results from gating of V1 intrinsic connections. To test this idea, using behavioral paradigms that engage top-down modulation of V1 contextual interactions, we recorded from chronically implanted electrode arrays in macaques. We observed task-dependent changes in interactions between V1 sites measured both by correlation between spike trains and by coherence between local field potentials (LFP-LFP coherence). The direction of the changes in aggregate activity, as measured by LFPs, depended on perceptual strategy: perceptual grouping increased LFP coherence between sites crucial for the task, whereas perceptual segregation lowered the LFP coherence. Using spiking activity as a measure, we found that the behaviorally driven changes in correlation structure between neurons dramatically increased the stimulus-related information that they convey; this additional increase in encoded information at the level of neuronal ensembles equals that obtained from task-driven reconfigurations of neural tuning curves. The improvements in information encoding were strongest for stimuli with greatest discrimination difficulty.