Topic: behavioural context

Neurons' coordinated firing generates meso- and macro-scale network activity and oscillations. These, in turn, influence the individual neurons’ firing. An example of this cross-scale modulation is phase precession, where the phase of the theta oscillation, as measured by local field potentials (LFP), governs hippocampal place cell firing. By introducing a new method referred to as state-conditioned decoding, we uncover a different cross-scale hippocampal modulation. Unlike in phase precession, here the LFP’s spectral properties (i.e., instantaneous frequency and amplitude) modulate the firing

Integration of information across different senses is a common property of cortical neurons. Somatosensory input impacts on auditory cortical processing through a mechanism that suppresses sound-evoked activity (Lohse et al., 2021). We carried out a number of experiments to investigate a) the perceptual implications of this crossmodal integrative process and b) its context dependence. In order to assess whether somatosensory suppression of sound-evoked activity affected the ability of mice to detect acoustic stimuli, we first performed a near-threshold sound detection experiment. While simulta