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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2010 Aug 19.
Published in final edited form as: Physiol Rev. 2010 Jul;90(3):1195–1268. doi: 10.1152/physrev.00035.2008

Figure 1. Examples of synchronous oscillations in cognitive behaviors.

Figure 1

(A) Theta rhythm in the hippocampus during spatial navigation. Top: in the task, rat shuttles back and forth along a linear track between food rewards contained in cups attached to movable walls. Middle: color- coded firing field of a place cell created from multiple runs in the eastward direction. Bottom: EEG theta rhythm and place cell firing (in red) for the same cell on a single eastward run. Ticks above the spikes indicate 0°/360° phase for each theta cycle, lines through theta waves indicate 270°. Bursts of spikes occur at higher than theta frequency causing each successive burst to move to an earlier phase of the theta cycle, despite initially rising, then falling firing rate. (B) Attention induces changes in synchrony in the visual cortex. Data shown are from experiments in which two visual stimuli were presented, one inside and one outside the receptive field of a neuron in area V4 of a behaving monkey. In the schematics (left), the green box represents the receptive field: this was not presented on the screen in the experiment. Red traces correspond to attention directed inside the receptive field of the recorded neuron; blue traces correspond to attention directed outside. Stimuli were the same in the two conditions. a and b: The continuous traces show the stimulus-driven local field potentials (LFPs). The spikes below were recorded simultaneously from different electrodes. c and d: Spike-triggered averages (STAs) computed during the stimulus presentation period. The STA corresponds to the average LFP waveform that is seen at the time of a spike. The y axes indicate the mean LFP; the x axes indicate time relative to the occurrence of a spike. e: Power spectra of the two STAs shown in c and d. When attention is focused inside the receptive field, the recorded neurons tend to fire more in phase with the frequency components around 50 Hz, and less so with respect to the frequencies around 10 Hz. (A) Reproduced with permission from [456], (B) from [838] with the original experimental data reported in [312].