Spontaneous Traveling Cortical Waves Gate Perception in Behaving Primates

Perceptual sensitivity varies from moment to moment. One potential source of variability is spontaneous fluctuations in cortical activity that can travel as a wave(1). Spontaneous traveling waves have been reported during anesthesia(2–7), but it is not known whether spontaneous traveling waves play a role during waking perception. Using newly developed analytic techniques to characterize the moment-to-moment dynamics of noisy multielectrode data, we find spontaneous waves of activity in extrastriate visual cortex of awake, behaving marmosets (Callithrix jacchus). In monkeys trained to detect faint visual targets, the timing and position of spontaneous traveling waves, prior to target onset, predict the magnitude of target-evoked activity and the likelihood of target detection. In contrast, spatially disorganized fluctuations of neural activity are much less predictive. These results reveal an important role for spontaneous traveling waves in sensory processing through modulating neural and perceptual sensitivity.