Endogenous activity modulates stimulus and circuit-specific neural tuning and perception

Perception reflects not only input from the sensory periphery, but also the endogenous neural state when sensory inputs enter the brain. Whether endogenous neural states influence perception only through global mechanisms, such as arousal, or can also perception in a neural circuit and stimulus specific manner remains largely unknown. Intracranial recordings from 30 pre-surgical epilepsy patients showed that endogenous activity independently modulated the strength of trial-by-trial neural tuning of different visual category-selective neural circuits. Furthermore, the same aspect of the endogenous activity that influenced tuning in a particular neural circuit also correlated with reaction time only for trials with the category of image that circuit was selective for. These results suggest that endogenous activity may influence neural tuning and perception through circuit-specific predictive coding processes.