PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Christopher M. Lewis AU - Conrado A. Bosman AU - Nicolas M. Brunet AU - Bruss Lima AU - Mark J. Roberts AU - Thilo Womelsdorf AU - Peter de Weerd AU - Sergio Neuenschwander AU - Wolf Singer AU - Pascal Fries TI - Two frequency bands contain the most stimulus-related information in visual cortex AID - 10.1101/049718 DP - 2016 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 049718 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/26/049718.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/26/049718.full AB - Sensory cortices represent the external world through the collective activity of diversely tuned cells. How the activity of single cells is coordinated within local populations, across whole cortical areas, and between different levels of a sensory hierarchy in order to reliably represent the external world is largely unknown. Cortical oscillations may play an important role in coordinating the activity of local and distributed neuronal groups. By using datasets from intracortical multi-electrode recordings and from large-scale electrocorticography (ECoG) grids, we investigated how parameters of visual stimulation could be extracted from the local field potential (LFP) and how this compared with the information available from multi-unit activity (MUA). MUA recorded from macaque V1 contained comparable amounts of stimulus information (orientation and motion direction) as simultaneously recorded LFP power in two frequency bands, one in the alpha-beta band and the other in the gamma band. In the ECoG array, covering a large portion of the left hemisphere, visual information was spatially limited to the recording sites in visual areas. ECoG-LFP contained most information in the same frequency bands as microelectrode-LFP. Most surprisingly, from the ECoG-LFP power in these frequency bands, we were able to decode the identity of natural scenes. The fact that information was contained in the same bands in both intracortical and ECoG recordings suggests that oscillatory activity could play similar roles at both spatial scales.