Abstract
Perception is an active process involving continuous interactions with the environment. During such interactions neural signals called corollary discharges (CDs) propagate across multiple brain regions informing the animal whether itself or the world is moving. How the interactions between concurrent CDs affect the large-scale network dynamics, and in turn help shape sensory perception is currently unknown. We focused on the effect of saccadic and body-movement CDs on a network of visual cortical areas in adult mice. CDs alone had large amplitudes, 3-4 times larger than visual responses, and could be dynamically described as standing waves. They spread broadly, with peak activations in the medial and anterior parts of the dorsal visual stream. Inhibition mirrored the wave-like dynamics of excitation, suggesting these networks remained E/I balanced. CD waves superimposed sub-linearly and asymmetrically: the suppression was larger if a saccade followed a body movement than in the reverse order. These rules depended on the animal’s cognitive state: when the animal was most engaged in a visual discrimination task, cortical states had large variability accompanied by increased reliability in sensory processing and a smaller non-linearity. Modeling results suggest these states permit independent encoding of CDs and sensory signals and efficient read-out by downstream networks for improved visual perception. In summary, our results highlight a novel cognitive-dependent arithmetic for the interaction of non-visual signals that dominate the activity of occipital cortical networks during goal-oriented behaviors. These findings provide an experimental and theoretical foundation for the study of active visual perception in ethological conditions.
