ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2015
Cortical state determines global variability and correlations in visual cortex.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 129 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
129 citing papers in PubMed, 241 citations in OpenAlex.
- Age-related changes in behavioural and neural variability in a decision-making task.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neural population dynamics of direct electrical stimulation of neocortex.Cell reports · 2026Article
- Spatiotemporal Divergence Between Intrinsic And Evoked Cortical Activity Predicts Visual Detection.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Cortical state contributions to neuronal response variability in the early visual cortex: A system identification approach.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Context flexibly modulates cue representations in visual cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Inferring internal states across mice and monkeys using facial features.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Deciphering neuronal variability across states reveals dynamic sensory encoding.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Between-area communication through the lens of within-area neuronal dynamics.Science advances · 2024Article
- Article
- What does the mean mean? A simple test for neuroscience.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Trial-by-trial variability in cortical responses exhibits scaling of spatial correlations predicted from critical dynamics.Cell reports · 2024Article
- Alpha-band fluctuations represent behaviorally relevant excitability changes as a consequence of top-down guided spatial attention in a probabilistic spatial cueing design.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Complexity and 1/f slope jointly reflect brain states.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Modeling the diverse effects of divisive normalization on noise correlations.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Rapid compensatory plasticity revealed by dynamic correlated activity in monkeys in vivo.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Propagation of activity through the cortical hierarchy and perception are determined by neural variability.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Sleep-like changes in neural processing emerge during sleep deprivation in early auditory cortex.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- The impact of the human thalamus on brain-wide information processing.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2023Review
- Spontaneous variations in arousal modulate subsequent visual processing and local field potential dynamics in the ferret during quiet wakefulness.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Correlated variability in primate superior colliculus depends on functional class.Communications biology · 2023Article
69 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The response of neurons in sensory cortex to repeated stimulus presentations is highly variable. To investigate the nature of this variability, we compared the spike activity of neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) of cats with that of their afferents from lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), in response to similar stimuli. We found variability to be much higher in V1 than in LGN. To investigate the sources of the additional variability, we measured the spiking activity of large V1 populations and found that much of the variability was shared across neurons: the variable portion of the responses of one neuron could be well predicted from the summed activity of the rest of the neurons. Variability thus mostly reflected global fluctuations affecting all neurons. The size and prevalence of these fluctuations, both in responses to stimuli and in ongoing activity, depended on cortical state, being larger in synchronized states than in more desynchronized states. Contrary to previous reports, these fluctuations invested the overall population, regardless of preferred orientation. The global fluctuations substantially increased variability in single neurons and correlations among pairs of neurons. Once this effect was removed, pairwise correlations were reduced and were similar regardless of cortical state. These results highlight the importance of cortical state in controlling cortical operation and can help reconcile previous studies, which differed widely in their estimate of neuronal variability and pairwise correlations.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.