Decoding Stimulus-Reward Pairing From Local Field Potentials Recorded From Monkey Visual Cortex

Single-trial decoding of brain recordings is a real challenge, since it pushes the signal-to-noise ratio issue to the limit. In this paper, we concentrate on the single-trial decoding of stimulus-reward pairing from local field potentials (LFPs) recorded chronically in the visual cortical area V4 of monkeys during a perceptual conditioning task. We developed a set of physiologically meaningful features that can classify and monitor the monkey´s training performance. One of these features is based on the recently discovered propagation of waves of LFPs in the visual cortex. Time-frequency features together with spatial features (phase synchrony and wave propagation) yield, after applying a feature selection procedure, an exceptionally good single-trial classification performance, even when using a linear classifier.