Abstract
A focal stimulus outside the receptive field robustly induces LFP change, while the same stimulus evokes no spike activity. We determined how this subthreshold LFP change interacted with spike response to the RF stimulus. Specifically, we sequentially presented two identical Gabor stimuli with a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA); the first one (S1) was presented outside RF inducing a subthreshold LFP change, and the second one (S2) was subsequently presented within RF generating a spiking response. This enabled us to manipulate the temporal relation between subthreshold LFP and evoked spike activity and to determine whether subthreshold LFP contributed to modulation of spike activity in a SOA-dependent manner. We found that the subthreshold LFP propagated a considerably long distance, estimated to be more than 10 mm of cortical distance. The cross-correlation between the time course of subthreshold LFP and the pattern of SOA-dependency of spike activity was significant. These results indicate that signal integration is farther beyond the RF than previously estimated based on spike-triggered average, and suggest that subthreshold LFP modulate spike activity in a SOA-dependent manner.