GABAA inhibition controls response gain in visual cortex
By S. Katzner, Laura Busse, Matteo Carandini. 2011
209 citations recorded by the source corpus.
GABAA inhibition is thought to play multiple roles in sensory cortex, such as controlling responsiveness and sensitivity, sharpening selectivity, and mediating competitive interactions. To test these proposals, we recorded in cat primary visual cortex (V1) after local iontophoresis of gabazine, the selective GABAA antagonist. Gabazine increased responsiveness by as much as 300%. It slightly decreased selectivity for stimulus orientation and direction, often by raising responses to all orientations. Strikingly, gabazine affected neither contrast sensitivity nor cross-orientation suppression, the competition seen when stimuli of different orientation are superimposed. These results were captured by a simple model in which GABAA inhibition has the same selectivity as excitation and keeps responses to unwanted stimuli below threshold. We conclude that GABAA inhibition in V1 helps enhance stimulus selectivity but is not responsible for competition among superimposed stimuli. It controls the sensitivity of V1 neurons by adjusting their response gain, without affecting their input gain.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, 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 Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
- Massimo Scanziani
- Bassam V. Atallah
- Matteo Carandini
- William Bruns
- Christoph Mulert
- Denise E. L. Lockhofen
- David J. Heeger
- Xiao-Jing Wang
In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Massimo Scanziani
- Bassam V. Atallah
- Matteo Carandini
- William Bruns
- Christoph Mulert
- Denise E. L. Lockhofen
- David J. Heeger
- Xiao-Jing Wang
Citations in the corpus
- How Inhibition Shapes Cortical Activity (2011, unknown): “The potential involvement of inhibition in cortical normalization is debated (Katzner et al., 2011) and needs to be elucidated.”
- Parvalbumin-Expressing Interneurons Linearly Transform Cortical Responses to Visual Stimuli (2012, background): “The results obtained here, therefore, provide a causal basis for the view that the response gain of neurons in visual cortex is under the control of GABAa mediated inhibition, as had been postulated based on pharmacological experiments (Katzner et al., 2011).”
- Neurochemistry of Visual Attention (2021, background): “Animal studies have found GABA to be involved in the regulation of attentional resources (Katzner et al., 2011; Paine et al., 2011; McGarrity et al., 2017) and to shape performance in visuo-spatial attention tasks (Petersen et al.”