Dissociation of attentional state and behavioral outcome using local field potentials

Successful behavior depends on attentional state and other factors related to decision-making, which may modulate neuronal activity differently. Here, we investigated whether attentional state and behavioral outcome (i.e., whether a target is detected or missed) are distinguishable using the power and phase of local field potential (LFP) recorded bilaterally from area V4 of monkeys performing a cued visual attention task. To link each trial’s outcome to pairwise measures of attention that are typically averaged across trials, we used several methods to obtain single-trial estimates of spike count correlation and phase consistency. Surprisingly, while attentional location was best discriminated using gamma and high-gamma power, behavioral outcome was best discriminated by alpha power and steady-state visually evoked potential. Power outperformed absolute phase in attentional/behavioral discriminability, although single-trial gamma phase consistency provided reasonably high attentional discriminability. Our results suggest a dissociation between the neuronal mechanisms that regulate attentional focus and behavioral outcome.