On cross-frequency phase-phase coupling between theta and gamma oscillations in the hippocampus.

ABSTRACT: Phase-amplitude coupling between theta and multiple gamma sub-bands is a hallmark of hippocampal activity and believed to take part in information routing. More recently, theta and gamma oscillations were also reported to exhibit phase-phase coupling, or n:m phase-locking, suggesting an important mechanism of neuronal coding that has long received theoretical support. However, by analyzing simulated and actual LFPs, here we question the existence of theta-gamma phase-phase coupling in the rat hippocampus. We show that the quasi-linear phase shifts introduced by filtering lead to spurious coupling levels in both white noise and hippocampal LFPs, which highly depend on epoch length, and that significant coupling may be falsely detected when employing improper surrogate methods. We also show

SUBMITTER: Scheffer-Teixeira R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5199196 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature