Abstract
Previous studies using Voltage sensitive dyes imaging on anesthetized cats reported that spontaneous ongoing cortical activity in the primary visual cortex represents dynamic
spatial patterns many of which resembling the functional architecture
of Orientation domains, and span large cortical
areas (Grinvald et al., 1989; Arieli et al., 1995; Arieli et al.,
1996; Tsodyks et al., 1999; Kenet et al., 2003; Fox et al., 2006;
Fox et al., 2007b). Those results suggest that ongoing activity
may play an important role in cortical processing and challenge
the classical notion which considers spontaneous ongoing
cortical activity as noise (Ferster D., 1996; Ringach D. L.,
2003; Fox et al., 2007a).We preformed VSDI of ongoing cortical
activity in the visual cortices of awake and anesthetized
monkeys. Our results shows that in the anesthetized monkey
spontaneous cortical activity shows larger repertoire of
cortical states which resemble both Ocular Dominance domains
as well as Orientation domains. We found large bias
toward the representation of cortical states which resemble
ocular dominance domains rather than orientation domains.
In comparison to the spontaneous ongoing activity in the
anesthetized monkey the dynamics of ongoing activity in the
awake monkey is much faster, and the coherence-length is
much smaller.
