Highly Selective Receptive Fields in Mouse Visual Cortex

By Cristopher Niell, Michael P. Stryker, W. M. Keck. Journal of Neuroscience, 2008

1,098 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Genetic methods available in mice are likely to be powerful tools in dissecting cortical circuits. However, the visual cortex, in which sensory coding has been most thoroughly studied in other species, has essentially been neglected in mice perhaps because of their poor spatial acuity and the lack of columnar organization such as orientation maps. We have now applied quantitative methods to characterize visual receptive fields in mouse primary visual cortex V1 by making extracellular recordings with silicon electrode arrays in anesthetized mice. We used current source density analysis to determine laminar location and spike waveforms to discriminate putative excitatory and inhibitory units. We find that, although the spatial scale of mouse receptive fields is up to one or two orders of magnitude larger, neurons show selectivity for stimulus parameters such as orientation and spatial frequency that is near to that found in other species. Furthermore, typical response properties such as linear versus nonlinear spatial summation (i.e., simple and complex cells) and contrastinvariant tuning are also present in mouse V1 and correlate with laminar position and cell type. Interestingly, we find that putative inhibitory neurons generally have less selective, and nonlinear, responses. This quantitative description of receptive field properties should facilitate the use of mouse visual cortex as a system to address longstanding questions of visual neuroscience and cortical processing.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2926b68662ed4684a2aaf453e9edc7a0fccf5211

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Citations in the corpus

Role of emergent neural activity in visual map development (2013, neutral): “Differences between ferret, cat and mice in the apparent role of vision in the emergence of various visual receptive field properties could be due to differences in the neural circuits underlying these response features (mice do not have maps for orientation or direction, though they do have orienta”
Broadly tuned response properties of diverse inhibitory neuron subtypes in mouse visual cortex (2010, neutral): “…their broad tuning for stimulus orientation, GABAergic neurons in mouse V1 also exhibited broader tuning for the spatial frequency of sinusoidal gratings as compared to excitatory neurons (Figure 4), consistent with electrophysiological studies of narrow-spiking neurons (Niell and Stryker, 2008).”
Parvalbumin-Expressing Interneurons Linearly Transform Cortical Responses to Visual Stimuli (2012, background): “…(Kawaguchi and Kubota, 1997), appear to respond less selectively to specific sensory stimulus features as compared to Pyr cells (Sohya et al., 2007; Niell and Stryker, 2008; Kerlin et al., 2010; Cardin et al., 2007), and play a role in shaping the timing and dynamic range of cortical activity…”
Firing Rate Homeostasis in Visual Cortex of Freely Behaving Rodents (2013, methodology): “Regular spiking pyramidal neurons comprise 80% of neocortical neurons; to enrich for putative pyramidal neurons, we separated RSUs from pFS cells ( 50% of the nonpyramidal population) using established criteria (Barthó et al., 2004; Cardin et al., 2007; Liu et al., 2009; Niell and Stryker, 2008): un”
Modulation of visual responses by behavioral state in mouse visual cortex. (2010, positive): “Interestingly, stimulus selectivity of visual neurons in the awake animal is nearly identical to that of the neurons we had studied previously in anesthetized mice (Niell and Stryker, 2008).”
Simultaneous multi-plane imaging of neural circuits (2016, positive): “This paradigm was chosen because drifting gratings produce robust responses in V1 (Niell and Stryker, 2008).”
Sensorimotor mismatch signals in primary visual cortex of the behaving mouse. (2012, positive): “Activity in visual cortex of anesthetized (Hubel and Wiesel, 1962, 1968; Niell and Stryker, 2008), awake paralyzed (Livingstone and Hubel, 1981), and awake fixating (Wurtz, 1969) animals has been shown to closely reflect the visual stimuli presented to the animal.”
Dense, Unspecific Connectivity of Neocortical Parvalbumin-Positive Interneurons: A Canonical Microcircuit for Inhibition? (2011, background): “…of specificity in their outputs, interneurons in layer 2/3 of visual cortex are broadly tuned to the orientation of a stimulus (Sohya et al., 2007; Niell and Stryker, 2008; Kerlin et al., 2010; Ma et al., 2010; Zariwala et al., 2011), although some PV interneurons in the more superficial part of…”
Optimization of a GCaMP calcium indicator for neural activity imaging (2012, methodology): “The orientation/direction selectivity was comparable to published reports based on electrophysiology (Niell and Stryker, 2008), suggesting that expression of 5G does not compromise the tuning properties of mouse cortical neurons.”
Neural Elements for Predictive Coding (2016, background): “…there is known to be a ‘deep-todeep’ component of the backward projection to V1, one that 3Katzel et al. (2011) further noted that the proportion, about 3:1, was similar to the relative frequency of simple and complex receptive fields recorded in layer 2/3 of mouse V1 (Niell and Stryker, 2008).”