Analysis of Slow (Theta) Oscillations as a Potential Temporal Reference Frame for Information Coding in Sensory Cortices

Christoph Kayser, Robin A. A. Ince, Stefano Panzeri

Abstract: Author Summary Neurons in sensory cortices encode objects in our sensory environment by varying the timing and number of action potentials that they emit. Brain networks that ‘decode’ this information need to partition those spike trains into their individual informative units. Experimenters achieve such partitioning by exploiting their knowledge about the millisecond precise timing of individual spikes relative to externally presented sensory stimuli. The brain, however, does not have access to this information and has to partition and decode spike trains using intrinsically available temporal reference frames. We show that slow (4–8 Hz) oscillatory network activity can provide such an intrinsic temporal reference. Specifically, we analyzed neural responses recorded in primary auditory and visual cortices. This revealed that the oscillatory reference frame performs nearly as well as the precise stimulus-locked reference frame and renders neural encoding robust to sensory noise and temporal uncertainty that naturally occurs during decoding. These findings provide a computational proof-of-concept that slow oscillatory network activity may serve the crucial function as temporal reference frame for sensory coding.