A ubiquitous spectrolaminar motif across independent studies, including Mackey et al.’s own data

Alex James Major, Ahmed Abdaltawab, Jessica M Phillips, Tian Wang, Eric Kenji Lee, Maxwell J Lichtenfeld, Chandramouli Chandrasekaran, Yuri B Saalmann, Alexander Maier, Robert Desimone, Earl K Miller, André M Bastos, Diego Mendoza-Halliday. bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology, Jul 2025.

Abstract

Our study (Mendoza-Halliday et al., 2024) made two contributions: (1) discovery of a ubiquitous cortical motif and (2) a tool derived from it-the Frequency-based Layer Identification Procedure (FLIP and vFLIP). Mackey et al. critique the tool, questioning its advantage over classic current source density (CSD) analysis, and reason backwards to challenge the motif’s ubiquity. In our rebuttal, we confirm the spectrolaminar motif in diverse cortical areas using data from multiple research groups…