Neural correlates of high-gamma oscillations (60-200 Hz) in macaque local field potentials and their potential implications in electrocorticography

Recent studies using electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings in humans have shown that functional activation of cortex is associated with an increase in power in the high-gamma frequency range (∼60-200 Hz). Here we investigate the neural correlates of this high-gamma activity in local field potential (LFP). Single units and LFP were recorded with microelectrodes from the hand region of macaque secondary somatosensory cortex while vibrotactile stimuli of varying intensities were presented to the hand. We found that high-gamma power in the LFP was strongly correlated with the average firing rate recorded by the microelectrodes, both temporally and on a trial-by-trial basis. In comparison, the correlation between firing rate and low-gamma power (40-80 Hz) was much smaller. To explore the potential effects of neuronal firing on ECoG, we developed a model to estimate ECoG power generated by different firing patterns of the underlying cortical population and studied how ECoG power varies with changes in firing rate versus the degree of synchronous firing between neurons in the population. Both an increase in firing rate and neuronal synchrony increased high-gamma power in the simulated ECoG data. However, ECoG high-gamma activity was much more sensitive to increases in neuronal synchrony than firing rate.