State-dependent Spatio-temporal Restructuring of Receptive Fields in the Primary Visual Pathway

Changing patterns in the EEG reflect changing states of attentiveness and are correlated to changes in the firing behavior of single cells. Prom experiments it is known that LGN cells of the Thalamus exhibit a tonic firing pattern during desynchronized EEG reflecting faithfully properties of a stimulus; whereas they are in a burst mode during synchronized EEG, which leads to a stereotype stimulus response. We introduce a model in which these changes in the neural temporal behavior lead to changes in the spatial characteristics of cortical receptive fields through variations in the effective connectivity between thalamic and cortical cells. This spatio-temporal receptive field restructuring reflects different modes of information processing and might be controlled by selective attention.