@article {Walke506956, author = {Edgar Y. Walke and Fabian H. Sinz and Emmanouil Froudarakis and Paul G. Fahey and Taliah Muhammad and Alexander S. Ecker and Erick Cobos and Jacob Reimer and Xaq Pitkow and Andreas S. Tolias}, title = {Inception in visual cortex: in vivo-silico loops reveal most exciting images}, elocation-id = {506956}, year = {2018}, doi = {10.1101/506956}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {Much of our knowledge about sensory processing in the brain is based on quasi-linear models and the stimuli that optimally drive them. However, sensory information processing is nonlinear, even in primary sensory areas, and optimizing sensory input is difficult due to the high-dimensional input space. We developed inception loops, a closed-loop experimental paradigm that combines in vivo recordings with in silico nonlinear response modeling to identify the Most Exciting Images (MEIs) for neurons in mouse V1. When presented back to the brain, MEIs indeed drove their target cells significantly better than the best stimuli identified by linear models. The MEIs exhibited complex spatial features that deviated from the textbook ideal of V1 as a bank of Gabor filters. Inception loops represent a widely applicable new approach to dissect the neural mechanisms of sensation.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/28/506956}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/12/28/506956.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }