Data from: Recurrent circuit dynamics underlie persistent activity in the macaque frontoparietal network

During delayed oculomotor response tasks, neurons in the lateral
intraparietal area (LIP) and the frontal eye fields (FEF) exhibit
persistent activity that reflects the active maintenance of behaviorally
relevant information. Despite many computational models of the mechanisms
of persistent activity, there is a lack of circuit-level data from the
primate to inform the theories. To fill this gap, we simultaneously
recorded ensembles of neurons in both LIP and FEF while macaques performed
a memory-guided saccade task. A population encoding model revealed strong
and symmetric long-timescale recurrent excitation between LIP and FEF.
Unexpectedly, LIP exhibited stronger local functional connectivity than
FEF, and many neurons in LIP had longer network and intrinsic timescales.
The differences in connectivity could be explained by the strength of
recurrent dynamics in attractor networks. These findings reveal reciprocal
multi-area circuit dynamics in the frontoparietal network during
persistent activity and lay the groundwork for quantitative comparisons to
theoretical models.