Abstract
Cortical responses to sensory stimuli are modulated by behavioral state. In the primary visual cortex (V1), visual responses of pyramidal neurons increase during locomotion. This response gain was suggested to be mediated through inhibitory neurons, resulting in the disinhibition of pyramidal neurons. Using in vivo two-photon calcium imaging in layers 2/3 and 4 in mouse V1, we reveal that locomotion increases the activity of vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP), somatostatin (SST) and parvalbumin (PV)-positive interneurons during visual stimulation, challenging the disinhibition model. In darkness, while most VIP and PV neurons remained locomotion responsive, SST and excitatory neurons were largely non-responsive. Context-dependent locomotion responses were found in each cell type, with the highest proportion among SST neurons. These findings establish that modulation of neuronal activity by locomotion is context-dependent and contest the generality of a disinhibitory circuit for gain control of sensory responses by behavioral state.
Highlights
The ability to see and process visual information is not an innate property of the visual cortex
For visual area 4 (V4), the signal correlations decreased for monkey 1 (M1) (p = 0.00054), but there was no significant change for monkey 2 (M2) (p = 0.73)
For M1, we found no significant change in the total, task-pertinent, or task-nonpertinent information about the stimulus encoded in V4 channels (p = 0.48, p = 0.19, and p = 0.94 respectively; see Figure 2.22a)
Summary
The ability to see and process visual information is not an innate property of the visual cortex. We found that despite a homogeneous distribution of the power of oscillations across the cortical depth, information was compartmentalised into the oscillations of the 4 Hz to 16 Hz range at the granular (G, layer 4) depths and the 60 Hz to 170 Hz range at the supragranular (SG, layers 1–3) depths, the latter of which is redundant with the population-level firing rate These two frequency ranges contain independent information about the stimulus, which we identify as related to two spatiotemporal aspects of the visual stimulus. Both the power and phase of oscillations in the 7 Hz to 20 Hz range contain information about scene transitions in the presented movie stimulus Such changes in the stimulus are similar to saccades in natural behaviour, and this may be indicative of predictive coding within the cortex
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