FUNCTIONAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN THE DORSOLATERAL PREFRONTAL CORTEX AND FRONTAL EYE FIELDS

Abstract

The dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (dlPFC) is essential for deployment of selective attention and maintenance of working memory. It is also involved in motor preparation, and cortical areas with anatomical connections to the dlPFC receive this information to be utilized for their respective purposes. One of these areas is the Frontal Eye Fields (FEF), which is primarily involved in preparing eye saccades commands. Interactions between the dlPFC and FEF are important for the delayed saccade task (DST), where memorized information guides the preparation and execution of the subsequent saccade response. When information is communicated between individual neurons, it is often ascertained through neural synchrony in overlapping Receptive Fields (RF). However, whether neural synchrony between the dlPFC and FEF is present as a function of motor preparatory communication remains unclear. Hence, we trained two monkeys to perform the DST and found that neural synchrony was not only observed between dlPFC and FEF cells, but also significantly increased in overlapping RF compared to non-overlapping RF. This study implicated that neural synchrony is a function of motor preparatory transmission between the dlPFC and FEF.