scholarly journals Spontaneous behaviors drive multidimensional, brain-wide activity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carsen Stringer ◽  
Marius Pachitariu ◽  
Nicholas Steinmetz ◽  
Charu Bai Reddy ◽  
Matteo Carandini ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Spontaneous Activity ◽  
Random Noise ◽  
Population Activity ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Cortical Responses ◽  
Ongoing Behavior ◽  
Visual Cortical ◽  
Mouse Visual Cortex ◽  
Behavioral Information

Cortical responses to sensory stimuli are highly variable, and sensory cortex exhibits intricate spontaneous activity even without external sensory input. Cortical variability and spontaneous activity have been variously proposed to represent random noise, recall of prior experience, or encoding of ongoing behavioral and cognitive variables. Here, by recording over 10,000 neurons in mouse visual cortex, we show that spontaneous activity reliably encodes a high-dimensional latent state, which is partially related to the mouse’s ongoing behavior and is represented not just in visual cortex but across the forebrain. Sensory inputs do not interrupt this ongoing signal, but add onto it a representation of visual stimuli in orthogonal dimensions. Thus, visual cortical population activity, despite its apparently noisy structure, reliably encodes an orthogonal fusion of sensory and multidimensional behavioral information.

scholarly journals Spontaneous behaviors drive multidimensional, brainwide activity

Science ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 364 (6437) ◽  
pp. eaav7893 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carsen Stringer ◽  
Marius Pachitariu ◽  
Nicholas Steinmetz ◽  
Charu Bai Reddy ◽  
Matteo Carandini ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Spontaneous Activity ◽  
Random Noise ◽  
Population Activity ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Neuronal Populations ◽  
Ongoing Behavior ◽  
Visual Cortical ◽  
Mouse Visual Cortex ◽  
External Stimuli

Neuronal populations in sensory cortex produce variable responses to sensory stimuli and exhibit intricate spontaneous activity even without external sensory input. Cortical variability and spontaneous activity have been variously proposed to represent random noise, recall of prior experience, or encoding of ongoing behavioral and cognitive variables. Recording more than 10,000 neurons in mouse visual cortex, we observed that spontaneous activity reliably encoded a high-dimensional latent state, which was partially related to the mouse’s ongoing behavior and was represented not just in visual cortex but also across the forebrain. Sensory inputs did not interrupt this ongoing signal but added onto it a representation of external stimuli in orthogonal dimensions. Thus, visual cortical population activity, despite its apparently noisy structure, reliably encodes an orthogonal fusion of sensory and multidimensional behavioral information.

scholarly journals A large-scale, standardized physiological survey reveals higher order coding throughout the mouse visual cortex

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saskia E. J. de Vries ◽  
Jerome Lecoq ◽  
Michael A. Buice ◽  
Peter A. Groblewski ◽  
Gabriel K. Ocker ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Natural Scenes ◽  
Visual Coding ◽  
Adult Mice ◽  
Cortical Responses ◽  
Visual Cortical ◽  
Mouse Visual Cortex ◽  
Hierarchical Computation

SummaryTo understand how the brain processes sensory information to guide behavior, we must know how stimulus representations are transformed throughout the visual cortex. Here we report an open, large-scale physiological survey of neural activity in the awake mouse visual cortex: the Allen Brain Observatory Visual Coding dataset. This publicly available dataset includes cortical activity from nearly 60,000 neurons collected from 6 visual areas, 4 layers, and 12 transgenic mouse lines from 221 adult mice, in response to a systematic set of visual stimuli. Using this dataset, we reveal functional differences across these dimensions and show that visual cortical responses are sparse but correlated. Surprisingly, responses to different stimuli are largely independent, e.g. whether a neuron responds to natural scenes provides no information about whether it responds to natural movies or to gratings. We show that these phenomena cannot be explained by standard local filter-based models, but are consistent with multi-layer hierarchical computation, as found in deeper layers of standard convolutional neural networks.

scholarly journals Representational drift in the mouse visual cortex

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Deitch ◽  
Alon Rubin ◽  
Yaniv Ziv
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Population Activity ◽  
Cortical Areas ◽  
Electrophysiological Recordings ◽  
The Face ◽  
Visual Cortical ◽  
Mouse Visual Cortex ◽  
Over Time

AbstractNeuronal representations in the hippocampus and related structures gradually change over time despite no changes in the environment or behavior. The extent to which such ‘representational drift’ occurs in sensory cortical areas and whether the hierarchy of information flow across areas affects neural-code stability have remained elusive. Here, we address these questions by analyzing large-scale optical and electrophysiological recordings from six visual cortical areas in behaving mice that were repeatedly presented with the same natural movies. We found representational drift over timescales spanning minutes to days across multiple visual areas. The drift was driven mostly by changes in individual cells’ activity rates, while their tuning changed to a lesser extent. Despite these changes, the structure of relationships between the population activity patterns remained stable and stereotypic, allowing robust maintenance of information over time. Such population-level organization may underlie stable visual perception in the face of continuous changes in neuronal responses.

scholarly journals A Disinhibitory Circuit for Contextual Modulation in Primary Visual Cortex

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas J. Keller ◽  
Mario Dipoppa ◽  
Morgane M. Roth ◽  
Matthew S. Caudill ◽  
Alessandro Ingrosso ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide ◽  
Primary Visual Cortex ◽  
Computational Modelling ◽  
Visual Scene ◽  
Inhibitory Neurons ◽  
Contextual Modulation ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Excitatory Neurons ◽  
Mouse Visual Cortex

Context guides perception by influencing the saliency of sensory stimuli. Accordingly, in visual cortex, responses to a stimulus are modulated by context, the visual scene surrounding the stimulus. Responses are suppressed when stimulus and surround are similar but not when they differ. The mechanisms that remove suppression when stimulus and surround differ remain unclear. Here we use optical recordings, manipulations, and computational modelling to show that a disinhibitory circuit consisting of vasoactive-intestinal-peptide-expressing (VIP) and somatostatin-expressing (SOM) inhibitory neurons modulates responses in mouse visual cortex depending on the similarity between stimulus and surround. When the stimulus and the surround are similar, VIP neurons are inactive and SOM neurons suppress excitatory neurons. However, when the stimulus and the surround differ, VIP neurons are active, thereby inhibiting SOM neurons and relieving excitatory neurons from suppression. We have identified a canonical cortical disinhibitory circuit which contributes to contextual modulation and may regulate perceptual saliency.

scholarly journals Dark Rearing Promotes the Recovery of Visual Cortical Responses but Not the Morphology of Geniculocortical Axons in Amblyopic Cat

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takahiro Gotou ◽  
Katsuro Kameyama ◽  
Ayane Kobayashi ◽  
Kayoko Okamura ◽  
Takahiko Ando ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Cortical Neurons ◽  
Visual Pathway ◽  
Monocular Deprivation ◽  
Postnatal Life ◽  
Visual Neurons ◽  
Cortical Responses ◽  
Soma Size ◽  
Visual Cortical ◽  
Dark Rearing

Monocular deprivation (MD) of vision during early postnatal life induces amblyopia, and most neurons in the primary visual cortex lose their responses to the closed eye. Anatomically, the somata of neurons in the closed-eye recipient layer of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) shrink and their axons projecting to the visual cortex retract. Although it has been difficult to restore visual acuity after maturation, recent studies in rodents and cats showed that a period of exposure to complete darkness could promote recovery from amblyopia induced by prior MD. However, in cats, which have an organization of central visual pathways similar to humans, the effect of dark rearing only improves monocular vision and does not restore binocular depth perception. To determine whether dark rearing can completely restore the visual pathway, we examined its effect on the three major concomitants of MD in individual visual neurons, eye preference of visual cortical neurons and soma size and axon morphology of LGN neurons. Dark rearing improved the recovery of visual cortical responses to the closed eye compared with the recovery under binocular conditions. However, geniculocortical axons serving the closed eye remained retracted after dark rearing, whereas reopening the closed eye restored the soma size of LGN neurons. These results indicate that dark rearing incompletely restores the visual pathway, and thus exerts a limited restorative effect on visual function.

scholarly journals Canonical and noncanonical features of the mouse visual cortical hierarchy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rinaldo D. D’Souza ◽  
Quanxin Wang ◽  
Weiqing Ji ◽  
Andrew M. Meier ◽  
Henry Kennedy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Receptive Field ◽  
Active Vision ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Hierarchical Organization ◽  
Hierarchical Level ◽  
Continuous Measure ◽  
Axonal Projections ◽  
Visual Cortical ◽  
Mouse Visual Cortex

ABSTRACTNeocortical circuit computations underlying active vision are performed by a distributed network of reciprocally connected, functionally specialized areas. Mouse visual cortex is a dense, hierarchically organized network, comprising subnetworks that form preferentially interconnected processing streams. To determine the detailed layout of the mouse visual hierarchy, laminar patterns formed by interareal axonal projections, originating in each of ten visual areas were analyzed. Reciprocally connected pairs of areas, and shared targets of pairs of source areas, exhibited structural features consistent with a hierarchical organization. Beta regression analyses, which estimated a continuous measure of hierarchical distance, indicated that the network comprises multiple hierarchies embedded within overlapping processing levels. Single unit recordings showed that within each processing stream, receptive field sizes typically increased with increasing hierarchical level; however, ventral stream areas showed overall larger receptive field diameters. Together, the results reveal canonical and noncanonical hierarchical network motifs in mouse visual cortex.

Neuronal Activities in the Mouse Visual Cortex Predict Patterns of Sensory Stimuli

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 473-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Cai ◽  
Bian Wu ◽  
Shuiwang Ji
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Mouse Visual Cortex

scholarly journals Long-term stability of neuronal ensembles in mouse visual cortex

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesús Pérez-Ortega ◽  
Tzitzitlini Alejandre-García ◽  
Rafael Yuste
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Spontaneous Activity ◽  
Internal Representation ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Long Term Stability ◽  
Neuronal Ensembles ◽  
Neuronal Populations ◽  
Evoked Activity ◽  
Mouse Visual Cortex ◽  
Over Time

AbstractCoactive neuronal ensembles are found in spontaneous and evoked cortical activity and are thought to participate in the internal representation of memories, perceptions, and mental states. In mouse visual cortex, ensembles can be optogenetically imprinted and are causally related to visual percepts, but it is still unknown how stable they are over time. Using two-photon volumetric microscopy, we performed calcium imaging over several weeks of the same neuronal populations in layer 2/3 of visual cortex of awake mice, tracking over time the activity of the same neurons in response to visual stimuli and under spontaneous activity. Only a small number of neurons remained active across days. Analyzing them, we found both stable ensembles, lasting up to 46 days, and transient ones, observed during only one imaging session. The majority of ensembles in visually-evoked activity were stable, whereas in spontaneous activity similar numbers of stable and transient ensembles were found. Among stable ensembles, more than 60 % of neurons still belonged to the same ensemble even after several weeks. These core ensemble cells had stronger functional connectivity than neurons that stopped belonging to the ensemble. Our results demonstrate that spontaneous and evoked neuronal ensembles can last weeks, providing a neuronal mechanism for the long-lasting representation of perceptual states or memories.

Increased amygdala-visual cortex connectivity in youth with persecutory ideation

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie N. DeCross ◽  
Amy H. Farabaugh ◽  
Avram J. Holmes ◽  
Maeve Ward ◽  
Emily A. Boeke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cortex ◽  
Resting State ◽  
Striate Cortex ◽  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scan ◽  
Resting State Functional Connectivity ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Increased Risk ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Visual Cortical

AbstractBackgroundSubclinical delusional ideas, including persecutory beliefs, in otherwise healthy individuals are heritable symptoms associated with increased risk for psychotic illness, possibly representing an expression of one end of a continuum of psychosis severity. The identification of variation in brain function associated with these symptoms may provide insights about the neurobiology of delusions in clinical psychosis.MethodsA resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scan was collected from 131 young adults with a wide range of severity of subclinical delusional beliefs, including persecutory ideas. Because of evidence for a key role of the amygdala in fear and paranoia, resting-state functional connectivity of the amygdala was measured.ResultsConnectivity between the amygdala and early visual cortical areas, including striate cortex (V1), was found to be significantly greater in participants with high (n = 43) v. low (n = 44) numbers of delusional beliefs, particularly in those who showed persistence of those beliefs. Similarly, across the full sample, the number of and distress associated with delusional beliefs were positively correlated with the strength of amygdala-visual cortex connectivity. Moreover, further analyses revealed that these effects were driven by those who endorsed persecutory beliefs.ConclusionsThese findings are consistent with the hypothesis that aberrant assignments of threat to sensory stimuli may lead to the downstream development of delusional ideas. Taken together with prior findings of disrupted sensory-limbic coupling in psychosis, these results suggest that altered amygdala-visual cortex connectivity could represent a marker of psychosis-related pathophysiology across a continuum of symptom severity.

scholarly journals Stable representation of a naturalistic movie emerges from episodic activity with gain variability

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ji Xia ◽  
Tyler D. Marks ◽  
Michael J. Goard ◽  
Ralf Wessel
Keyword(s):  
Basic Unit ◽  
Experimental Session ◽  
Population Activity ◽  
Long Term Stability ◽  
Stimulus Representation ◽  
Cortical Responses ◽  
Stable Representation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Visual Cortical ◽  
Episodic Activity

AbstractVisual cortical responses are known to be highly variable across trials within an experimental session. However, the long-term stability of visual cortical responses is poorly understood. Here using chronic imaging of V1 in mice we show that neural responses to repeated natural movie clips are unstable across weeks. Individual neuronal responses consist of sparse episodic activity which are stable in time but unstable in gain across weeks. Further, we find that the individual episode, instead of neuron, serves as the basic unit of the week-to-week fluctuation. To investigate how population activity encodes the stimulus, we extract a stable one-dimensional representation of the time in the natural movie, using an unsupervised method. Most week-to-week fluctuation is perpendicular to the stimulus encoding direction, thus leaving the stimulus representation largely unaffected. We propose that precise episodic activity with coordinated gain changes are keys to maintain a stable stimulus representation in V1.

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