Pyramidal neuron burst ring frequencies are modulated by di erent interneuron populations

Abstract

It is currently thought that attention is a way that mammals have of overcoming the bottleneck that limits the amount of information received from the environment that can be processed. Prefrontal regions have been shown to be involved in selective attention in macaques. During such process, the generation of short bursts is facilitated, specially at two narrow frequency bands within the beta (12-20 Hz) and the gamma (50-70 Hz) ranges. Here we have tested a novel mechanism in which both synchronised activities can be modeled by two separate networks composed of pyramidal neurons and two types of interneurons, the somatostatin and the parvalbumin expressing interneurons. The two oscillatory rhythms are obtained by increasing the importance in the network of one of interneuron types. Top-down activation was necessary for ring at gamma frequencies but not beta for the proposed mechanism. The proposed network architecture furthers our knowledge in how multiple frequency bands could be generated in similar brain areas.