Functional role of spontaneous activity of the cortical neuron in sensory information processing

在大脑皮层，刺激诱导的神经活动分布在感觉皮质的广泛区域，这表明传播活动在感觉加工中起着重要作用。自发的神经活动也会在大脑皮层区域传播，并与刺激诱导的传播活动相互作用。然而，自发活动在感觉加工中的作用在很大程度上仍不清楚。我使用电压敏感染料的多点光学记录技术研究了这些问题，以检查神经活动的时空模式，并分析了传播自发活动对刺激诱导的神经反应的影响。自发活动的传播速度和模式不同于刺激诱发活动。自发的和刺激诱导的活动都抑制了随后刺激诱导的活动的传播。

In the cerebral cortex, the stimulus-induced neural activity spread over the wide region of the sensory cortex, and it is suggested that the propagating activity play an important role in the sensory processing. Spontaneous neural activities also propagate across large cortical area and interact with a stimulus-induced propagating activity. However, the function of spontaneous activity in the sensory processing largely remains unexplained. I approached these problems using the multiple-site optical recording technique with a voltage sensitive dye for examining the spatio-temporal pattern of neural activities, and analyzed the effect of propagating spontaneous activities on a stimulus-induced neural response. The propagating velocity and pattern of spontaneous activity differed from that of stimulus-induced activity. Both spontaneous and stimulus-induced activities suppressed the propagation of subsequent stimulus-induced activity.