Effective Connectivity Shows Asymmetries in Resonance and Latencies between Medial and Lateral Prefrontal Cortex Connections

The lab has a first article published about the strength, latency and resonance patterns of connections between the anterior cingulate cortex and lateral prefrontal cortex of the macaque. This work was led by postdoc Veronica Nacher and is published in Brain Structure and Function.
The paper identifies a novel electrical microstimulation protocol that can be used to map the efficacy of synaptic connections between distant brain structures.
We found that dACC stimulation-triggered evoked fields (EFPs) were more likely to be multiphasic in the lateral prefrontal cortex than in the reverse direction, with a large proportion of connections showing 2–4 inflection points resembling resonance in the 20–30 Hz beta frequency range. In addition we found that stimulation of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) resulted, on average, in shorter-latency EFPs than lPFC → dACC. Overall, latencies and connectivity strength varied more than twofold depending on the precise anterior-to-posterior location of the connections. The Preprint pdf is linked here, the Brain Structure and Function pdf is linked here.

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