Theta Phase Entrainment of Single-Cell Spiking in Rat Somatosensory Barrel Cortex and Secondary Visual Cortex Is Enhanced during Multisensory Discrimination Behavior

Phase entrainment of cells by theta oscillations is thought to globally coordinate the activity of cell assemblies across different structures, such as the hippocampus and neocortex. This coordination is likely required for optimal processing of sensory input during recognition and decision-making processes. In quadruple-area ensemble recordings from male rats engaged in a multisensory discrimination task, we investigated phase entrainment of cells by theta oscillations in areas along the corticohippocampal hierarchy: somatosensory barrel cortex (S1BF), secondary visual cortex (V2L), perirhinal cortex (PER), and dorsal hippocampus (dHC). Rats discriminated between two 3D objects presented in tactile-only, visual-only, or both tactile and visual modalities. During task engagement, S1BF, V2L, PER, and dHC LFP signals showed coherent theta-band activity. We found phase entrainment of single-cell spiking activity to locally recorded as well as hippocampal theta activity in S1BF, V2L, PER, and dHC. While phase entrainment of hippocampal spikes to local theta oscillations occurred during sustained epochs of task trials and was nonselective for behavior and modality, somatosensory and visual cortical cells were only phase entrained during stimulus presentation, mainly in their preferred modality (S1BF, tactile; V2L, visual), with subsets of cells selectively phase-entrained during cross-modal stimulus presentation (S1BF: visual; V2L: tactile). This effect could not be explained by modulations of firing rate or theta amplitude. Thus, hippocampal cells are phase entrained during prolonged epochs, while sensory and perirhinal neurons are selectively entrained during sensory stimulus presentation, providing a brief time window for coordination of activity.

Coherent mapping of position and head direction across auditory and visual cortex

Neurons in primary visual cortex (V1) may not only signal current visual input but also relevant contextual information such as reward expectancy and the subject’s spatial position. Such contextual representations need not be restricted to V1 but could participate in a coherent mapping throughout sensory cortices. Here, we show that spiking activity coherently represents a location-specific mapping across auditory cortex (AC) and lateral, secondary visual cortex (V2L) of freely moving rats engaged in a sensory detection task on a figure-8 maze. Single-unit activity of both areas showed extensive similarities in terms of spatial distribution, reliability, and position coding. Importantly, reconstructions of subject position based on spiking activity displayed decoding errors that were correlated between areas. Additionally, we found that head direction, but not locomotor speed or head angular velocity, was an important determinant of activity in AC and V2L. By contrast, variables related to the sensory task cues or to trial correctness and reward were not markedly encoded in AC and V2L. We conclude that sensory cortices participate in coherent, multimodal representations of the subject’s sensory-specific location. These may provide a common reference frame for distributed cortical sensory and motor processes and may support crossmodal predictive processing.