How is single-neuron activity related to LFP oscillations?

Local field potentials (LFPs) can provide biomarkers of cognitive function at the meso-scale level of brain organization. LFPs represent the aggregation of thousands of transmembrane currents from local and non-local brain regions and it is thus still not understood how LFPfluctuations relate to action potentials of single neurons. Because these action potentials represent key units of computation in the human brain it is important to understand how they relate to and interact with LFPs during human cognitive functioning. Using intracranial probes which include both macro- and micro- electrodes, researchers can simultaneously measure synchronous changes in single-neuron action potentials and LFPs with respect to human cognition and behavior. In this chapter, we describe recent advances in recording and analyzing simultaneous single-neuron spiking and LFP oscillations. We provide a practical guide to estimating the relationship between neural spiking, LFP power, and LFP phase—with a specific focus on recent approaches to investigating how different LFP oscillations might modulate the timing of single-neuron spiking.We describe how the relationship between the LFP and single-neuron spiking is thought to be functionallyimportant for representing information in the brain, and suggest that studying this relationship has broad relevance for understanding the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying human cognition.