Selective control of prefrontal neural timescales by parietal cortex.

Overview

1. Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, CA USA
2. Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA USA
3. Department of Neurobiology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA
4. Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, University of California, Davis, CA USA
5. Department of Mathematics, University of California, Davis, CA USA

Abstract

The frontal eye field (FEF) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) are key hubs of the dorsal attention network, yet how parietal inputs shape prefrontal circuit temporal dynamics and attentional computations remains largely unknown. We measured intrinsic timescales of FEF neurons in male rhesus macaques and examined their changes during 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 a role in rapid visual processing. In contrast, long-timescale neurons exhibited stronger sustained salience representation, suggesting a role in spatiotemporal integration to maintain stimulus-driven attention. During PPC inactivation, intrinsic timescales increased in both neuron types, with a substantially larger effect in short-timescale neurons. In addition, PPC inactivation selectively disrupted salience computation, particularly in long-timescale neurons. These findings provide causal evidence linking intrinsic local neural timescales to long-range inter-area communication and indicate the presence of at least two distinct network motifs that support different neuronal dynamics and functional computations within the FEF.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

No file of the authors' code could be read here: it is described below, and read at its source.

Code availability

The analysis code used to perform all statistical analyses and generate all figures is publicly available via a Code Ocean capsule (https://codeocean.com/capsule/0814945). The capsule includes the code and the dataset needed to reproduce the analyses and figures (R v4.4.1; RStudio v2024.4.2.764).

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

Datasets cited

• figshare:28971866, at figshare; found in “Data availability”

Data availability

The data generated in this study have been deposited in the Figshare database (10.6084/m9.figshare.28971866). Source data are provided with this paper.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 30 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 4 authors, 3 keywords, 9 MeSH terms, 4 funders, 60 references.

Cite

This paper

Soyuhos, O., Zirnsak, M., Chaudhuri, R., & Chen, X. (2026). Selective control of prefrontal neural timescales by parietal cortex. Nature communications, 17(1), 3687. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70326-1

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