PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Spacek, Martin A. AU - Born, Gregory AU - Crombie, Davide AU - Bauer, Yannik AU - Liu, Xinyu AU - Katzner, Steffen AU - Busse, Laura TI - Robust effects of corticothalamic feedback during naturalistic visual stimulation AID - 10.1101/776237 DP - 2020 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 776237 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/24/776237.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/24/776237.full AB - Neurons in the dorsolateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) of the thalamus are contacted by a large number of feedback synapses from cortex, whose role in visual processing is poorly understood. Past studies investigating this role have mostly used simple visual stimuli and anesthetized animals, but corticothalamic (CT) feedback might be particularly relevant during processing of complex visual stimuli, and its effects might depend on behavioral state. Here, we find that CT feedback robustly modulates responses to naturalistic movie clips by increasing response gain and promoting tonic firing mode. Compared to these robust effects for naturalistic movies, CT feedback effects on firing rates were less consistent for simple grating stimuli, likely related to differences in spatial context. Finally, while CT feedback and locomotion affected dLGN responses in similar ways, we found their effects to be largely independent. We propose that CT feedback and behavioral state use separate circuits to modulate visual information on its way to cortex in a context-dependent manner.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.