Context-dependent relationships between locus coeruleus firing patterns and coordinated neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex

Abstract
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Abstract

Ascending neuromodulatory projections from the locus coeruleus (LC) affect cortical neural networks via the release of norepinephrine (NE). However, the exact nature of these neuromodulatory effects on neural activity patterns in vivo is not well understood. Here we show that in awake monkeys, LC activation is associated with changes in coordinated activity patterns in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). These relationships, which are largely independent of changes in firing rates of individual ACC neurons, depend on the type of LC activation: ACC pairwise correlations tend to be reduced when ongoing (baseline) LC activity increases but enhanced when external events evoke transient LC responses. Both relationships covary with pupil changes that reflect LC activation and arousal. These results suggest that modulations of information processing that reflect changes in coordinated activity patterns in cortical networks can result partly from ongoing, context-dependent, arousal-related changes in activation of the LC-NE system.

Data availability

Data and Matlab code for all figures in this manuscript are available at:https://github.com/TheGoldLab/LC_ACC_paper_Joshi_Gold_2021.git

Article and author information

Author details

Siddhartha Joshi

Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, United States

For correspondence
thesidjoshi@gmail.com

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0529-9430
Joshua I Gold

Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

Competing interests
Joshua I Gold, Senior editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6018-0483

Funding

National Institutes of Health (R21 MH107001)

Joshua I Gold

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All animal training, surgery and experimental procedures were performed in accordance withthe NIH's Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and were approved by the Universityof Pennsylvania Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (protocol 806027).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.