Abstract
Mammalian visual behaviors, as well as responses in the neural systems underlying these behaviors, are driven by luminance and color contrast. With constantly improving tools for measuring activity in cell-type-specific populations in the mouse during visual behavior, it is important to define the extent of luminance and color information that is behaviorally accessible to the mouse. A non-uniform distribution of cone opsins in the mouse retina potentially complicates both luminance and color sensitivity; opposing gradients of short (UV-shifted) and middle (blue/green) cone opsins suggest that color discrimination and wavelength-specific luminance contrast sensitivity may differ with retinotopic location. Here we ask how well mice can discriminate color and wavelength-specific luminance changes across visuotopic space. We found that mice were able to discriminate color and were able to do so more broadly across visuotopic space than expected from the cone-opsin distribution. We also found wavelength-band-specific differences in luminance sensitivity.
Highlights
Mice were able to discriminate color, but only at elevations above the horizon. We find both wavelength-specific luminance and color contrast sensitivity to be dependent on retinotopic location, but that these differences in sensitivity were less dramatic than expected from the cone opsin distribution, suggesting behavioral access to differential activation of rods and cones
Total luminance was in the mesopic range (
H), we found color discrimination was negligible at À10 ̊, but mice were capable of varying levels of color sensitivity at all other elevations tested (Figure 3F,G)
Summary
The mouse visual system is increasingly (Baker, 2013; Priebe and McGee, 2014) being used as a model system for studying both cortical sensory processing (Glickfeld et al, 2013, 2014; Niell and Stryker, 2008, 2010; Wang et al, 2011a) and behavior (Busse et al, 2011; Harvey et al, 2012; Histed et al, 2012; Hoy et al, 2016; Montijn et al, 2015). Short and middle opsin responses broadly overlap in V1 and higher visual areas (Rhim et al, 2017) and rod-cone antagonism can create color opponency in some mouse retinal ganglion cells (Joesch and Meister, 2016), presenting the possibility that behaviorally relevant color information could be extracted more broadly across retinotopic space. There is some evidence for color discrimination (Jacobs et al, 2004), but it remains unclear how this depends on overall luminance, luminance contrast, or retinotopic position It is not known if the gradients in opsin distribution lead to variations in behavioral luminance sensitivity across space
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