TY - JOUR TI - Maintained avalanche dynamics during task-induced changes of neuronal activity in nonhuman primates AU - Yu, Shan AU - Ribeiro, Tiago L AU - Meisel, Christian AU - Chou, Samantha AU - Mitz, Andrew AU - Saunders, Richard AU - Plenz, Dietmar A2 - Chestek, Cynthia VL - 6 PY - 2017 DA - 2017/11/08 SP - e27119 C1 - eLife 2017;6:e27119 DO - 10.7554/eLife.27119 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.27119 AB - Sensory events, cognitive processing and motor actions correlate with transient changes in neuronal activity. In cortex, these transients form widespread spatiotemporal patterns with largely unknown statistical regularities. Here, we show that activity associated with behavioral events carry the signature of scale-invariant spatiotemporal clusters, neuronal avalanches. Using high-density microelectrode arrays in nonhuman primates, we recorded extracellular unit activity and the local field potential (LFP) in premotor and prefrontal cortex during motor and cognitive tasks. Unit activity and negative LFP deflections (nLFP) consistently changed in rate at single electrodes during tasks. Accordingly, nLFP clusters on the array deviated from scale-invariance compared to ongoing activity. Scale-invariance was recovered using ‘adaptive binning’, that is identifying clusters at temporal resolution given by task-induced changes in nLFP rate. Measures of LFP synchronization confirmed and computer simulations detailed our findings. We suggest optimization principles identified for avalanches during ongoing activity to apply to cortical information processing during behavior. KW - cortex KW - prefrontal KW - premotor KW - behavior KW - neuronal avalanches KW - local-field potential JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -