A method for closed-loop presentation of sensory stimuli conditional on the internal brain-state of awake animals.

ABSTRACT: Brain activity often consists of interactions between internal-or on-going-and external-or sensory-activity streams, resulting in complex, distributed patterns of neural activity. Investigation of such interactions could benefit from closed-loop experimental protocols in which one stream can be controlled depending on the state of the other. We describe here methods to present rapid and precisely timed visual stimuli to awake animals, conditional on features of the animal's on-going brain state; those features are the presence, power and phase of oscillations in local field potentials (LFP). The system can process up to 64 channels in real time. We quantified its performance using simulations, synthetic data and animal experiments (chronic recordings in the dorsal cortex of awake turtles).

SUBMITTER: Rutishauser U 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3781774 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature