PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Peter Zatka-Haas
AU  - Nicholas A. Steinmetz
AU  - Matteo Carandini
AU  - Kenneth D. Harris
TI  - Distinct contributions of mouse cortical areas to visual discrimination
AID  - 10.1101/501627
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 501627
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/21/501627.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/21/501627.full
AB  - Sensory decisions involve multiple cortical areas, but the specific roles of these areas are not well understood. We trained head-fixed mice to discriminate visual contrast and report their decision with a wheel turn. Widefield calcium imaging revealed task-related activity in multiple cortical areas: visual (VIS), secondary motor (MOs), primary motor and somatosensory. Optogenetic inactivation, however, impaired performance only in VIS and MOs. The animal’s choices could be related to cortical activity using a simple neurometric model that weighed activity in VIS and MOs. The model’s weights revealed different roles for these regions: VIS promotes contraversive and suppresses ipsiversive choices, whereas MOs promotes both contraversive and ipsiversive choices. With no further parameter adjustments, the same model predicted the effect of local optogenetic inactivation. These results indicate that neocortex causally supports visual discrimination through visual and frontal but not primary motor areas, and provides a quantitative framework relating cortical activity to decisions.