TY - JOUR T1 - Attention selectively gates afferent signal transmission to area V4 JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/019547 SP - 019547 AU - Iris Grothe AU - David Rotermund AU - Simon David Neitzel AU - Sunita Mandon AU - Udo Alexander Ernst AU - Andreas Kurt Kreiter AU - Klaus Richard Pawelzik Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/05/19/019547.abstract N2 - Selective attention causes visual cortical neurons to act as if only one of multiple stimuli are within their receptive fields. This suggests that attention employs a, yet unknown, neuronal gating mechanism for transmitting only the information that is relevant for the current behavioral context. We introduce an experimental paradigm to causally investigate this putative gating and the mechanism underlying selective attention by determining the signal availability of two time-varying stimuli in local field potentials of V4 neurons. We find transmission of the low frequency (<20Hz) components only from the attended visual input signal and that the higher frequencies from both stimuli are attenuated. A minimal model implementing routing by synchrony replicates the attentional gating effect and explains the spectral transfer characteristics of the signals. It supports the proposal that selective gamma-band synchrony subserves signal routing in cortex and further substantiates our experimental finding that attention selectively gates signals already at the level of afferent synaptic input. ER -