Published on December 19, 2018 | Updated on January 29, 2019

CORTEX conference by Julien Vezoli

December 16th, 2016

Inter-areal structural connectivity shapes pattern and strength of frequency-specific functional interactions.

Higher-order cognitive functions require an integration of top-down and bottom-up information that is thought to be conveyed through anatomical feedback and feedforward connections, respectively. In order to effectively integrate its different inputs, a given area must be able to identify what information is top-down vs. bottom-up. This might be achieved anatomically, since feedforward and feedback connections have different source and termination layers (Markov, Vezoli et al., JCompNeurol 2014). However, strong inter-laminar connectivity implies that these signals could quickly become locally intermixed. Therefore, the cortex might retain additional mechanisms to segregate these different paths of information flow. In the first part of my talk, I will describe recent results that provide a putative mechanism for the cortex to functionally integrate bottom-up and top-down inputs (Bastos, Vezoli, Bosman et al., Neuron 2015; Michalareas et al., Neuron 2016). In the second part of the talk, I will show you work-in-progress (Vezoli et al., SfN 2015) relating anatomical connection strength to frequency-resolved inter-areal functional connectivity and exploring these different band-limited networks for their topographic and graph-theoretic properties.