SUMMARY
The aim of this work is to provide a comment on a recent paper by Muzzu and Saleem (2021). In brief, our concern is that the authors claim that visuomotor mismatch responses in mouse visual cortex can be explained by a locomotion-induced gain of visual halt responses, without directly comparing these responses to mismatch responses. Without a direct comparison, the claim that one response can explain the other appears difficult to uphold, more so because previous work finds that a uniform locomotion-induced gain cannot explain mismatch responses. To support these arguments, we analyzed a series of layer 2/3 calcium imaging datasets and show that coupling between visual flow and locomotion greatly enhances mismatch responses in an experience dependent manner compared to halts in non-coupled visual flow. This is consistent with mismatch responses representing visuomotor prediction errors. Thus, we conclude that feature selectivity cannot explain mismatch responses in mouse visual cortex.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
We corrected two errors in our analysis code. These resulted in small changes to Figure 2 and to some of the numbers reported in the manuscript (none of which change the reported comparisons). The cause for the error was that in a subset of imaging sites, closed-loop sessions were longer than assumed in the code and thus some mismatch trials were misclassified as early playback halt trials in Figures 2F-G. Correcting this error did not affect the outcome of any of the comparisons made.
