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Figure 1

From: Attention strengthens across-trial pre-stimulus phase coherence in visual cortex, enhancing stimulus processing

Figure 1The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

Attention modulates phase coherence. (A) Behavioral paradigm. Each trial started when the monkey foveated a central fixation point and touched a lever. The receptive field of the neuron under study is indicated by a dashed circle (not present on the screen). (B) Phase coherence modulation (PCM) Map. X-axis plots time (ms) aligned to the cue onset and Y-axis represents the LFP oscillation frequency in Hz. Each Y-axis value indicates the center of a 4 Hz frequency band. The colors represent the values of the PCM calculated by the formula: (attend-in phase coherence - attend-out phase coherence)/(attend-in phase coherence + attend-out phase coherence), averaged across the 31 sites with at least 50 trials. The region indicated by the saturated line shows frequency-time pairs with a statistically significant PCM. A star marks the frequency-time pair with the maximum PCM (at 200 ms, 8 Hz). (C) Polar histogram of the instantaneous phase for a sample site in attend-in (red) and attend-out (blue) trials for the time-frequency pair (200 ms, 8 Hz). The values indicate the number of trials that share a given phase. A high value therefore indicates a large amount of inter-trial coherence for that instantaneous LFP phase. The total number of trials are 70 for each condition in this site. As the figure shows, the trials in the attend-in condition are more coherent (towards phase 330°) than trials in the attend-out condition (p-value < 0.001 for attend-in condition, p-value = 0.9 for attend-out condition; Rayleigh test, p-value < 0.001 for difference in phase coherence; permutation test) (D) Histograms of average phases of recording sites separated by the attention condition. The polar histograms consist of 15 bins and in each bin, the number of average phase vectors of sub-trials (separated by attention condition) in sites is plotted (p-value < 0.0001 for attend-in phases, p-value = 0.12 for attend-out phases; Rayleigh test. p-value = 0.034 for difference in the coherence of the sites’ average phases between attention conditions; permutation test). The mean vectors of the attend-in and attend-out groups are shown in red and blue, respectively (See Also Figs. S1–S4).

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