Motor preparation attenuates neural variability and beta-band LFP in parietal cortex

Accumulative evidence shows that neural variability is meaningful and powerful during brain information processing, but how cognitive state influences neural variability is still unclear. We studied neural variability during motor preparation in lateral intraparietal area (LIP), a brain area closely involved in saccade generation. During motor preparation, we observed significant variability decline, and the decline highly correlated with beta-band local field potential (LFP) fluctuations. Furthermore, we found similar variance-LFP correlations in both the memory-guided saccade task and the visually-guided saccade task. These results indicate a possible linkage between beta-band LFP and trial-to-trial neural variability.