Selective control of prefrontal neural timescales by parietal cortex - After 1st revision

Intrinsic neural timescales quantify how long spontaneous neuronal activity patterns persist, reflecting dynamics of endogenous fluctuations. We measured intrinsic timescales of frontal eye field (FEF) neurons in rhesus macaques and examined their changes during posterior parietal cortex (PPC) inactivation. We observed two distinct classes of FEF neurons based on their intrinsic timescales: short-timescale neurons (~25 ms) and long-timescale neurons (~100 ms). Short-timescale neurons showed stronger transient visual responses, suggesting their role in rapid visual processing. In contrast, long-timescale neurons exhibited stronger sustained salience representation, suggesting a role in spatiotemporal integration for maintaining stimulus-driven attention. During PPC inactivation, intrinsic timescales increased in both neuron types, with a significantly larger effect in short-timescale neurons. In addition, PPC inactivation disrupted salience computation, particularly in long-timescale neurons. Here, our findings provide the first causal evidence linking intrinsic local neural timescales to long-range inter-area communications and show the presence of at least two distinct network motifs that support different neuronal dynamics and functional computations within the FEF.