Nice paper by Bressler and colleagues showing that top-down influences on visual cortex are mediated by beta-band oscillations.
Richter, C. G., Coppola, R., & Bressler, S. L. (2018). Top-down beta oscillatory signaling conveys behavioral context in early visual cortex. Scientific reports, 8(1), 6991.
Further reading on beta oscillations mediating top-down processing:
Buschman, T.J. and Miller, E.K. (2007) Top-down versus bottom-up control of attention in the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices. Science. 315: 1860-1862 View PDF »
Bastos, A.M., Loonis, R., Kornblith, S., Lundqvist, M., and Miller, E.K. (2018) Laminar recordings in frontal cortex suggest distinct layers for maintenance and control of working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. View PDF
A new addition to the proposed circuitry for top-down control.
White, M. G., Panicker, M., Mu, C., Carter, A. M., Roberts, B. M., Dharmasri, P. A., & Mathur, B. N. (2018). Anterior Cingulate Cortex Input to the Claustrum Is Required for Top-Down Action Control. Cell reports, 22(1), 84-95.
Due to a disruption of top-down attentional amplification.
Berkovitch, L., Dehaene, S., & Gaillard, R. (2017). Disruption of Conscious Access in Schizophrenia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Gradual progression from sensory to task-related processing in cerebral cortex
Scott L. Brincat*, Markus Siegel*, Constantin von Nicolai, Earl K. Miller
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/195602
Abstract
Somewhere along the cortical hierarchy, behaviorally relevant information is distilled from raw sensory inputs. We examined how this transformation progresses along multiple levels of the hierarchy by comparing neural representations in visual, temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices in monkeys categorizing across three visual domains (shape, motion direction, color). Representations in visual areas MT and V4 were tightly linked to external sensory inputs. In contrast, prefrontal cortex (PFC) largely represented the abstracted behavioral relevance of stimuli (task rule, motion category, color category). Intermediate-level areas — posterior inferotemporal (PIT), lateral intraparietal (LIP), and frontal eye fields (FEF) — exhibited mixed representations. While the distribution of sensory information across areas aligned well with classical functional divisions — MT carried stronger motion information, V4 and PIT carried stronger color and shape information — categorical abstraction did not, suggesting these areas may participate in different networks for stimulus-driven and cognitive functions. Paralleling these representational differences, the dimensionality of neural population activity decreased progressively from sensory to intermediate to frontal cortex. This shows how raw sensory representations are transformed into behaviorally relevant abstractions and suggests that the dimensionality of neural activity in higher cortical regions may be specific to their current task.
A discussion of how bottom-up sensory information elicits high-frequency gamma oscillations. By contrast, top-down processing, which provides the context that coordinates cortical processing, elicits lower-frequency theta, alpha, beta oscillations. We have drawn similar conclusions based on our own work.
The cross-frequency mediation mechanism of intracortical information transactions
RD Pascual-Marqui, P Faber, S Ikeda, R Ishii, T Kinoshita, Y Kitaura, K Kochi, P Milz, K Nishida, M Yoshimura
Woolgar et al provide a meta-analysis of experiments using multivoxel pattern analysis in FMRI. They show that cortical areas traditionally though to be visual, auditory or motor, primarily (though not exclusively) code visual, auditory, and motor information. However, the frontoparietal cortex is hypothesized to a multiple-demand network and it shows domain generality, coding multisensory and rule information.
Woolgar, Alexandra, Jade Jackson, and John Duncan. “Coding of visual, auditory, rule, and response information in the brain: 10 years of multivoxel pattern analysis.” Journal of cognitive neuroscience (2016).
Bressler and Richter review evidence that top-down processing in the cortex depends on synchronization of oscillatory rhythms between brain areas. More specifically, they hypothesize that beta band (13-30 Hz) synchrony conveys information about behavioral context (task information) to neurons in sensory cortex.