Long-Range and Local Circuits for Top-Down Modulation of Visual Cortical Processing

By Siyu Zhang, Min Xu, Tsukasa Kamigaki, Johnny Phong Hoang Do, Sean Jenvay, Kazunari Miyamichi, Liqun Luo, Y. Dan. Science, 2014

721 citations recorded by the source corpus.

You only see what you want to see We often focus on a particular item out of a thousand objects in a visual scene. This ability is called selective attention. Selective attention enhances the responses of sensory nerve cells to whatever is being observed and dampens responses to any distractions. Zhang et al. identified a region of the mouse forebrain that modulates responses in the visual cortex. This modulation improved the mouse's performance in a visual task. Science, this issue p. 660 Projections from the frontal cortex control stimulus processing in the visual system in mice. Top-down modulation of sensory processing allows the animal to select inputs most relevant to current tasks. We found that the cingulate (Cg) region of the mouse frontal cortex powerfully influences sensory processing in the primary visual cortex (V1) through long-range projections that activate local γ-aminobutyric acid–ergic (GABAergic) circuits. Optogenetic activation of Cg neurons enhanced V1 neuron responses and improved visual discrimination. Focal activation of Cg axons in V1 caused a response increase at the activation site but a decrease at nearby locations (center-surround modulation). Whereas somatostatin-positive GABAergic interneurons contributed preferentially to surround suppression, vasoactive intestinal peptide-positive interneurons were crucial for center facilitation. Long-range corticocortical projections thus act through local microcircuits to exert spatially specific top-down modulation of sensory processing.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensory Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f20980cab3ceffb9e1a8c328d00986fc42ac382

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Sensory Systems

Andy Clark

Citations in the corpus

Predictive Processing: A Canonical Cortical Computation (2018, background): “This form of top-down inhibition is a frequent circuit motif in cortex (Lee et al., 2013; Schneider et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2014).”
Towards deep learning with segregated dendrites (2016, background): “Indeed, framing cortico-cortical feedback as a mechanism to modulate incoming sensory activity is a more common way of viewing feedback signals in the neocortex (Larkum, 2013; Gilbert and Li, 2013; Zhang et al., 2014; Fiser et al., 2016).”
Gaining knowledge mediates changes in perception (without differences in attention): A case for perceptual learning (2015, background): “processing from descending neural pathways — and these sorts of modulation are often also commonly called “top-down” effects (e.g. Gilbert & Wu, 2013; Rolls, 2008; Zhang et al., 2014).”