RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Segregated encoding of spatiotemporal features in the mouse visual cortex
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 441014
DO 10.1101/441014
A1 Xu Han
A1 Ben Vermaercke
A1 Vincent Bonin
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/12/441014.abstract
AB Understanding visual processing requires a detailed description of computations performed by neurons across stages of the visual system. However, the diverse tunings of neurons beyond the primary visual cortex (V1) have yet to be fully characterized. Using two-photon calcium imaging and stochastic visual stimuli, we catalogued the response properties of a dense sample of 40,000 neurons in V1 and six secondary visual areas of awake mice. All areas encode unique sets of features with distinct spatiotemporal preferences, motion speed selectivity, and differential responses to oriented and non-oriented stimuli. Central areas V1 and LM have the most diverse tunings, with distributed spatiotemporal preferences and a moderate bias for nonoriented stimuli. Preferences of V1 and LM neurons differ strikingly showing tuning to low and midrange spatiotemporal frequencies, respectively. Lateral areas PM and LI are highly biased towards high spatial and low temporal frequencies, showing weak selectivity for motion speed. Anterior areas AL, RL and AM are highly biased towards high temporal frequencies and have the largest proportion of motion tuned cells. Accordingly, activity patterns in these areas carry more information about motion speed than any other visual areas. With regards to spatial preferences, LI differs strikingly from PM and anterior areas in that it is heavily biased towards non-oriented stimuli. The data provides a detailed description of the segregation of encoding of spatiotemporal feature in the rodent visual cortex and provides a stark demonstration of the high functional specialization of visual areas.