Analysis of dominant neural activity clustering in laminar cortical processing of acoustic stimuli in rat utilizing von Mises-Fisher distribution

Despite decades of analytical research on sensory late evoked responses the information potential of evoked potentials is not yet exhausted. The influence of spectro-temporal synchronization dynamics in the sensory cortices on non-invasively recorded data remains still elusive. Evoked responses align reliably in phase during repetitive stimulus presentation, and are subject to attentional modulation. This indicates that phase alignment and thus response reliability is a key mechanism of (conscious) sensory processing. It is necessary to analyze underlying neural activity clustering in detail to gain a better understanding of attentional resource allocation. For this article we analyzed laminar activity clustering in Local Field Potentials (LFP) utilizing von Mises-Fisher distribution across 8 columnar aligned penetrating electrodes as a first approach to identify the role of increased response reliability as a mechanism of attentional neurodynamics.