Anisotropic spatial coherence of ongoing and spontaneous activities in auditory cortex

We carried out voltage-sensitive dye imaging of the guinea pig auditory cortex to determine whether the ongoing and spontaneous activities of the cortex exhibit spatial coherence reflecting the tonotopic organization of the cortex. We used independent component analysis and a signal-plus-noise model to extract ongoing activities from the observed signals including physiological noise and stimulus-evoked activities. We analyzed the cross-correlations of background activities between all pairs of recording channels and found that ongoing and spontaneous activities in the auditory cortex exhibited anisotropic spatial coherence extending along the isofrequency bands.