Oscillations in spontaneous and visually evoked neuronal activity in the superficial layers of the cat’s superior colliculus

Oscillations are ubiquitous features of neuronal activity in sensory systems and are considered as a substrate for the integration of sensory information. Several studies have described oscillatory activity in the geniculate visual pathway, but little is known about this phenomenon in the extrageniculate visual pathway. We describe oscillations in evoked and background activity in the cat’s superficial layers of the superior colliculus, a retinorecipient structure in the extrageniculate visual pathway. Extracellular singleunit activity was recorded during periods with and without visual stimulation under isoflurane anesthesia in the mixture of N 2 O/O 2 . Autocorrelation, FFT and renewal density analyses were used to detect and characterize oscillations in the neuronal activity. Oscillations were common in the background and stimulus-evoked activity. Frequency range of background oscillations spanned between 5 – 90 Hz. Oscillations in evoked activity were observed in about half of the cells and could appear in two forms – stimulus-phase-locked (10 – 100 Hz), and stimulus-phase-independent (8 – 100 Hz) oscillations. Stimulus-phase-independent and background oscillatory frequencies were very similar within activity of particular neurons suggesting that stimulus-phase-independent oscillations may be a form of enhanced “spontaneous” oscillations. Stimulus-phase-locked oscillations were present in responses to moving and flashing stimuli. In contrast to stimulus-phase-independent oscillations, the strength of stimulus-phase-locked oscillations was positively correlated with stimulus velocity and neuronal firing rate. Our results suggest that in the superficial layers of the superior colliculus stimulus-phase-independent oscillations may be generated by the same mechanism(s) that lie in the base of “spontaneous” oscillations, while stimulus-phase-locked oscillations may result from interactions within the intra-collicular network and/or from a phase reset of oscillations present in the background activity.