RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Population coding and oscillatory subspace synchronization integrate context into actions
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.12.17.473118
DO 10.1101/2021.12.17.473118
A1 Jan Weber
A1 Anne-Kristin Solbakk
A1 Alejandro O. Blenkmann
A1 Anais Llorens
A1 Ingrid Funderud
A1 Sabine Leske
A1 Pål Gunnar Larsson
A1 Jugoslav Ivanovic
A1 Robert T. Knight
A1 Tor Endestad
A1 Randolph F. Helfrich
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/12/17/2021.12.17.473118.abstract
AB Contextual cues and prior evidence guide human goal-directed behavior. To date, the neurophysiological mechanisms that implement contextual priors to guide subsequent actions remain unclear. Here we demonstrate that increasing behavioral uncertainty introduces a shift from an oscillatory to a continuous processing mode in human prefrontal cortex. At the population level, we found that oscillatory and continuous dynamics reflect dissociable signatures that support distinct aspects of encoding, transmission and execution of context-dependent action plans. We show that prefrontal population activity encodes predictive context and action plans in serially unfolding orthogonal subspaces, while prefrontal-motor theta oscillations synchronize action-encoding population subspaces to mediate the hand-off of action plans. Collectively, our results reveal how two key features of large-scale population activity, namely continuous population trajectories and oscillatory synchrony, operate in concert to guide context-dependent human behavior.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.