A Neural Circuit for Spatial Summation in Visual Cortex

By Hillel Adesnik, William Bruns, H. Taniguchi, Z. J. Huang, Massimo Scanziani. Nature, 2012

690 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The response of cortical neurons to a sensory stimulus is modulated by the context. In the visual cortex, for example, stimulation of a pyramidal cell's receptive-field surround can attenuate the cell’s response to a stimulus in the centre of its receptive field, a phenomenon called surround suppression. Whether cortical circuits contribute to surround suppression or whether the phenomenon is entirely relayed from earlier stages of visual processing is debated. Here we show that, in contrast to pyramidal cells, the response of somatostatin-expressing inhibitory neurons (SOMs) in the superficial layers of the mouse visual cortex increases with stimulation of the receptive-field surround. This difference results from the preferential excitation of SOMs by horizontal cortical axons. By perturbing the activity of SOMs, we show that these neurons contribute to pyramidal cells' surround suppression. These results establish a cortical circuit for surround suppression and attribute a particular function to a genetically defined type of inhibitory neuron.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/068c0c2532716ba3a1ca9f9de037ae8d02c348c6

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Citations in the corpus

Rapid homeostasis by disinhibition during whisker map plasticity (2014, background): “Fourth, in cases where specific interneurons are tuned to specific sensory features (53), feature-specific homeostasis could be implemented by disinhibition within the specific B”
Parvalbumin-expressing interneurons linearly control olfactory bulb output (2013, neutral): “In these experiments, mice were head fixed but otherwise unrestrained and free to run on a passive circular treadmill (Figure 4A; Adesnik et al., 2012).”
Primary Visual Cortex Represents the Difference Between Past and Present (2013, background): “Both weak effects on neuronal tuning properties (e.g. Niell and Stryker 2010) and strong modulations (e.g. Adesnik et al. 2012) have been reported when comparing anesthetized and awake states.”
GABAergic interneurons in the neocortex: From cellular properties to circuits (2016, neutral): “, 2011; Xu and Callaway, 2009) and visual (Adesnik et al., 2012) cortices and forward interareal cortico-cortical connections, such as primary to secondary visual cortices (Yang et al.”
Predictive Processing: A Canonical Cortical Computation (2018, background): “interneurons, likely driven by lateral projections from neighboring cortical neurons, have been shown to have a causal role in surround suppression (Adesnik et al., 2012; Angelucci et al., 2017).”
Neural Elements for Predictive Coding (2016, background): “They do not receive excitatory input not from layer 4, but only from local axon collaterals of pyramidal cells in layers 2/3 (Xu and Callaway, 2009; Adesnik et al., 2012), and consequently show longer latency to activation by visual stimuli (Ma et al., 2010).”
A Feedback Model of Attention Explains the Diverse Effects of Attention on Neural Firing Rates and Receptive Field Structure (2016, background): “The mechanisms for within-RF and surround suppression are likely to differ [43], and the mechanism for surround suppression remains largely unclear (see the apparently conflicting results of [44] and [45]; also [46] and [47]).”
Complementary roles of dimensionality and population structure in neural computations (2020, methodology): “Fast developing tools for dissecting neural circuits have opened the possibility of mapping such functional classes onto genetic and anatomic cell types, and given a new momentum to this cell-category approach [Adesnik et al., 2012; Ye et al., 2016; Kvitsiani et al., 2013; Hangya et al., 2014; Pinto”
A cortical circuit for gain control by behavioral state (2014, background): “It has been reported that VIP neurons in V1 strongly inhibit SSTpositive inhibitory neurons (Pfeffer et al., 2013), whose activation results in suppression of the visual response of excitatory neurons (Adesnik et al., 2012).”