Thalamus provides layer 4 of primary visual cortex with orientation- and direction-tuned inputs

By Wenzhi Sun, Zhongchao Tan, B. Mensh, Na Ji. 2015

237 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the functions of a brain region requires knowing the neural representations of its myriad inputs, local neurons and outputs. Primary visual cortex (V1) has long been thought to compute visual orientation from untuned thalamic inputs, but very few thalamic inputs have been measured in any mammal. We determined the response properties of ∼28,000 thalamic boutons and ∼4,000 cortical neurons in layers 1–5 of awake mouse V1. Using adaptive optics that allows accurate measurement of bouton activity deep in cortex, we found that around half of the boutons in the main thalamorecipient L4 carried orientation-tuned information and that their orientation and direction biases were also dominant in the L4 neuron population, suggesting that these neurons may inherit their selectivity from tuned thalamic inputs. Cortical neurons in all layers exhibited sharper tuning than thalamic boutons and a greater diversity of preferred orientations. Our results provide data-rich constraints for refining mechanistic models of cortical computation.

Subfields: Biophysics, Cognitive Neuroscience

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biophysics

1. Sylvain Gigan
2. S. Rotter
3. Changhuei Yang
4. Ori Katz
5. Frank Tong
6. Lei Tian
7. S. Shipp
8. Roarke Horstmeyer

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Frank Tong
2. S. Shipp
3. Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
4. John-Dylan Haynes

Citations in the corpus

• Re-evaluating circuit mechanisms underlying pattern separation (2019, critical): “However, rather than the random expansion predicted by Marr-Albus theory, visual cortical neurons receive specific geniculate inputs that contribute to their direction selectivity (Reid and Alonso, 1995; Sun et al., 2016; Lien and Scanziani, 2018).”
• Foundations of Vision (2018, background): “A large percentage of thalamic boutons show some degree of orientation selectivity (Kondo & Ohki, 2016; Sun et al., 2016), raising the possibility that these coarsely tuned inputs may also contribute to the oriented structure of V1 receptive fields (Vidyasagar & Eysel, 2015).”
• Neural Elements for Predictive Coding (2016, background): “However, a fraction of orientation tuning in mouse V1 is inherited from its geniculate input (Kondo and Ohki, 2016; Sun et al., 2016), since mouse LGN itself demonstrates intrinsic orientation (and direction) selective responses (Piscopo et al., 2013; Tang et al., 2016).”
• Roadmap on wavefront shaping and deep imaging in complex media (2021, methodology): “(b) Three-photon fluorescence images of a neuron, its dendrites, and dendritic spines before and after AO using indirect wavefront sensing [37].”