Parvalbumin-Expressing Interneurons Linearly Transform Cortical Responses to Visual Stimuli

By Bassam V. Atallah, William Bruns, Matteo Carandini, Massimo Scanziani. Neuron, 2012

635 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The response of cortical neurons to a sensory stimulus is shaped by the network in which they are embedded. Here we establish a role of parvalbumin (PV)-expressing cells, a large class of inhibitory neurons that target the soma and perisomatic compartments of pyramidal cells, in controlling cortical responses. By bidirectionally manipulating PV cell activity in visual cortex we show that these neurons strongly modulate layer 2/3 pyramidal cell spiking responses to visual stimuli while only modestly affecting their tuning properties. PV cells' impact on pyramidal cells is captured by a linear transformation, both additive and multiplicative, with a threshold. These results indicate that PV cells are ideally suited to modulate cortical gain and establish a causal relationship between a select neuron type and specific computations performed by the cortex during sensory processing.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5763ba4a9de9e394744ce98dd1b7591ce49edf3c

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Citations in the corpus

Fast-spiking, parvalbumin+ GABAergic interneurons: From cellular design to microcircuit function (2014, background): “In the primary visual cortex, activation or inactivation of PV interneurons changes the gain of orientation tuning curves in pyramidal neurons, whereas the width of these curves remains largely unchanged [(94, 95), but see (102)].”
Neural Elements for Predictive Coding (2016, background): “Considering the superficial layers in particular, PV cells are found to provide feedforward inhibition, related to exerting gain control over incoming signals (Ma et al., 2010; Atallah et al., 2012; Wilson et al., 2012).”
Parvalbumin-expressing interneurons linearly control olfactory bulb output (2013, neutral): “…December 4, 2013 ª2013 Elsevier Inc. classes of inhibitory neurons have begun to shed light on how inhibitory neurons regulate cortical processing of sensory information (Adesnik et al., 2012; Atallah et al., 2012; Gentet et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2012; Sohal et al., 2009; Wilson et al., 2012).”
Unsupervised Discovery of Demixed, Low-Dimensional Neural Dynamics across Multiple Timescales through Tensor Component Analysis (2017, positive): “This model is supported by experimental evidence in many contexts [22, 37, 76–78], and underlies inﬂuential theories of cortical computation [30, 31] and perceptual learning [79].”
Inhibition of Inhibition in Visual Cortex: The Logic of Connections Between Molecularly Distinct Interneurons (2013, neutral): “The categorization of neuron types based on immunohistochemical characteristics[2,3] has been crucial for defining genetic strategies aimed at identifying, targeting, recording or manipulating distinct neuron categories[21,49].”