Abstract

We act upon stimuli in our surrounding environment by gathering the multisensory they convey, integrating this information and deciding on a behavioral action. How the neural integration of sensory information affects behavioral decisions and where in the brain this process takes place are still open questions. We hypothesized that the anterolateral secondary visual cortex (area AL) could serve as a hub in the mouse brain during sensorimotor transformation of audiovisual information because it projects strongly to motor areas and receives input from both primary visual (V1) and auditory (A1) cortex. We imaged neuronal activity in V1 and AL of the mouse during a detection task using visual, auditory and audiovisual stimuli. During detection of visual stimuli, neurons in AL responded more strongly to visual stimuli which were presented with a contrast around the detection threshold of the mouse as compared with V1 neurons. At the level of the population, neurometric detection thresholds were lower in AL compared to V1 and showed a close approximation of behavioral thresholds for detecting visual stimuli. Distinctively during audiovisual stimulation, AL neurons showed stronger differentiation of behaviorally reported versus unreported stimuli compared to V1. This suggests that neural population activity in area AL more closely correlates with multisensory detection behavior than V1. Taken together, these results indicate that AL amplifies sensory signals and shows a neural correlate of determining whether multisensory stimuli will ultimately result in a behavioral report of stimulus detection.

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