Hierarchical gradients of multiple timescales in the mammalian forebrain

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Songa, Min; Shin, Eun Ju; Seod, Hyojung; Soltanie, Alireza; Steinmetz, Nicholas A.; Lee, Daeyeol; Jung, Min Whan; Paikk, Se-Bum
• 署名单位: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST); Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST); Institute for Basic Science - Korea (IBS); Yale University; University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle; Johns Hopkins University; Johns Hopkins University; Johns Hopkins University; Johns Hopkins University; Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-11309
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2415695121
• 发表日期: 2024-12-09
• 关键词: DECISION-MAKING; prefrontal cortex; DYNAMICS; signals; striatum; memory; ORGANIZATION; INFORMATION; mechanisms; recurrent

摘要

Many anatomical and physiological features of cortical circuits, ranging from the biophysical properties of synapses to the connectivity patterns among different neuron types, exhibit consistent variation along the hierarchical axis from sensory to association areas. Notably, the temporal correlation of neural activity at rest, known as the intrinsic timescale, increases systematically along this hierarchy in both primates and rodents, analogous to the increasing scale and complexity of spatial receptive fields. However, how the timescales for task- related activity vary across brain regions and whether their hierarchical organization appears consistently across different mammalian species remain unexplored. Here, we show that both the intrinsic timescale and those of task- related activity follow a similar hierarchical gradient in the cortices of monkeys, rats, and mice. We also found that these timescales covary similarly in both the cortex and basal ganglia, whereas the timescales of thalamic activity are shorter than cortical timescales and do not conform to the hierarchical order predicted by their cortical projections. These results suggest that the hierarchical gradient of cortical timescales might represent a universal feature of intracortical circuits in the mammalian brain.