Spatiotemporal firing patterns in the frontal cortex of behaving monkeys

1. Activity of up to 10 single units was recorded in parallel from frontal areas of behaving monkeys. 2. Spatiotemporal firing patterns were revealed by a method that detects all excessively repeating patterns regardless of their complexity or single-unit composition. 3. Excess of repeating patterns was found in 30-60% of the cases examined when timing jitter of 1-3 ms was allowed. 4. An independent test refuted the hypothesis that these patterns represented chance events. 5. In a given behavioral condition there were usually many different patterns, each repeating several times, and not one (or a few) pattern repeating many times. 6. In 13 out of 20 cases, when a single unit elevated its firing rate in association with an external event beyond 40/s, most of the spikes within that period were associated with excessively repeating spatiotemporal patterns. 7. Of 157 types of patterns whose excess was most marked, 107 were composed of spikes from one single unit, 45 of the patterns contained spikes from two single units, and only one was composed of spikes from three different single units. 8. These properties suggest that the patterns were generated by reverberations in a synfire mode within self-exciting cell assemblies.