Task difficulty modulates the activity of specific neuronal populations in primary visual cortex

SummarySensory exposure alters the response properties of individual neurons in primary sensory cortices. However, it remains unclear how these changes affect stimulus encoding by populations of sensory cells. Here, recording from populations of neurons in cat primary visual cortex, we demonstrate that visual exposure enhances stimulus encoding and discrimination. We find that repeated presentation of brief, high-contrast shapes results in a stereotyped, biphasic population response consisting of a short-latency transient, followed by a late and extended period of reverberatory activity. Visual exposure selectively improves the stimulus specificity of the reverberatory activity, by increasing the magnitude and decreasing the trial-to-trial variability of the neuronal response. Critically, this improved stimulus encoding is distributed across the population and depends on precise temporal coordination. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of an exposure-driven optimization process that enhances the encoding power of neuronal populations in early visual cortex, thus potentially benefiting simple readouts at higher stages of visual processing.

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Decoding the activity of neuronal populations in macaque primary visual cortex

Nature Neuroscience ◽

10.1038/nn.2733 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

pp. 239-245 ◽

Cited By ~ 142

Author(s):

Arnulf B A Graf ◽

Adam Kohn ◽

Mehrdad Jazayeri ◽

J Anthony Movshon

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Primary Visual Cortex ◽

Neuronal Populations

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Columnar coding of neuronal populations in primary visual cortex

Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience ◽

10.3389/conf.neuro.06.2009.03.293 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

Author(s):

Yen Shih-Cheng

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Primary Visual Cortex ◽

Neuronal Populations

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Scaling of information in large neural populations reveals signatures of information-limiting correlations

10.1101/2020.01.10.902171 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

MohammadMehdi Kafashan ◽

Anna Jaffe ◽

Selmaan N. Chettih ◽

Ramon Nogueira ◽

Iñigo Arandia-Romero ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Primary Visual Cortex ◽

Visual Stimulus ◽

Brain Area ◽

Correlated Noise ◽

Neuronal Populations ◽

Total Information ◽

Neural Populations ◽

The Brain ◽

Stimulus Direction

AbstractHow is information distributed across large neuronal populations within a given brain area? One possibility is that information is distributed roughly evenly across neurons, so that total information scales linearly with the number of recorded neurons. Alternatively, the neural code might be highly redundant, meaning that total information saturates. Here we investigated how information about the direction of a moving visual stimulus is distributed across hundreds of simultaneously recorded neurons in mouse primary visual cortex (V1). We found that information scales sublinearly, due to the presence of correlated noise in these populations. Using recent theoretical advances, we compartmentalized noise correlations into information-limiting and nonlimiting components, and then extrapolated to predict how information grows when neural populations are even larger. We predict that tens of thousands of neurons are required to encode 95% of the information about visual stimulus direction, a number much smaller than the number of neurons in V1. Overall, these findings suggest that the brain uses a widely distributed, but nonetheless redundant code that supports recovering most information from smaller subpopulations.

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Coherent representations of subjective spatial position in primary visual cortex and hippocampus

10.1101/235648 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Aman B. Saleem ◽

E. Mika Diamanti ◽

Julien Fournier ◽

Kenneth D. Harris ◽

Matteo Carandini

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Primary Visual Cortex ◽

Spatial Location ◽

Visual Responses ◽

V1 Neurons ◽

Neuronal Populations ◽

Subjective Estimate ◽

Ca1 Region ◽

Navigational Systems

A major role of vision is to guide navigation, and navigation is strongly driven by vision1-4. Indeed, the brain’s visual and navigational systems are known to interact5, 6, and signals related to position in the environment have been suggested to appear as early as in visual cortex6, 7. To establish the nature of these signals we recorded in primary visual cortex (V1) and in the CA1 region of the hippocampus while mice traversed a corridor in virtual reality. The corridor contained identical visual landmarks in two positions, so that a purely visual neuron would respond similarly in those positions. Most V1 neurons, however, responded solely or more strongly to the landmarks in one position. This modulation of visual responses by spatial location was not explained by factors such as running speed. To assess whether the modulation is related to navigational signals and to the animal’s subjective estimate of position, we trained the mice to lick for a water reward upon reaching a reward zone in the corridor. Neuronal populations in both CA1 and V1 encoded the animal’s position along the corridor, and the errors in their representations were correlated. Moreover, both representations reflected the animal’s subjective estimate of position, inferred from the animal’s licks, better than its actual position. Indeed, when animals licked in a given location – whether correct or incorrect – neural populations in both V1 and CA1 placed the animal in the reward zone. We conclude that visual responses in V1 are tightly controlled by navigational signals, which are coherent with those encoded in hippocampus, and reflect the animal’s subjective position in the environment. The presence of such navigational signals as early as in a primary sensory area suggests that these signals permeate sensory processing in the cortex.

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Neuronal population mechanisms of lightness perception

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00906.2017 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 120 (5) ◽

pp. 2296-2310 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Douglas A. Ruff ◽

David H. Brainard ◽

Marlene R. Cohen

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Primary Visual Cortex ◽

Neuronal Population ◽

Neuronal Responses ◽

Lightness Perception ◽

Neuronal Mechanism ◽

Area V4 ◽

Neuronal Populations ◽

Types Of Information ◽

The Way

The way that humans and animals perceive the lightness of an object depends on its physical luminance as well as its surrounding context. While neuronal responses throughout the visual pathway are modulated by context, the relationship between neuronal responses and lightness perception is poorly understood. We searched for a neuronal mechanism of lightness by recording responses of neuronal populations in monkey primary visual cortex (V1) and area V4 to stimuli that produce a lightness illusion in humans, in which the lightness of a disk depends on the context in which it is embedded. We found that the way individual units encode the luminance (or equivalently for our stimuli, contrast) of the disk and its context is extremely heterogeneous. This motivated us to ask whether the population representation in either V1 or V4 satisfies three criteria: 1) disk luminance is represented with high fidelity, 2) the context surrounding the disk is also represented, and 3) the representations of disk luminance and context interact to create a representation of lightness that depends on these factors in a manner consistent with human psychophysical judgments of disk lightness. We found that populations of units in both V1 and V4 fulfill the first two criteria but that we cannot conclude that the two types of information in either area interact in a manner that clearly predicts human psychophysical measurements: the interpretation of our population measurements depends on how subsequent areas read out lightness from the population responses. NEW & NOTEWORTHY A core question in visual neuroscience is how the brain extracts stable representations of object properties from the retinal image. We searched for a neuronal mechanism of lightness perception by determining whether the responses of neuronal populations in primary visual cortex and area V4 could account for a lightness illusion measured using human psychophysics. Our results suggest that comparing psychophysics with population recordings will yield insight into neuronal mechanisms underlying a variety of perceptual phenomena.

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Neuronal population mechanisms of lightness perception

10.1101/294280 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Douglas A. Ruff ◽

David H. Brainard ◽

Marlene R. Cohen

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Primary Visual Cortex ◽

Neuronal Population ◽

Neuronal Responses ◽

Lightness Perception ◽

Neuronal Mechanism ◽

Area V4 ◽

Neuronal Populations ◽

Types Of Information ◽

The Way

AbstractThe way that humans and animals perceive the lightness of an object depends on its physical luminance as well as its surrounding context. While neuronal responses throughout the visual pathway are modulated by context, the relationship between neuronal responses and lightness perception is poorly understood. We searched for a neuronal mechanism of lightness by recording responses of neuronal populations in monkey primary visual cortex (V1) and area V4 to stimuli that produce a lightness illusion in humans, in which the lightness of a disk depends on the context in which it is embedded. We found that the way individual units encode the luminance (or equivalently for our stimuli, contrast) of the disk and its context is extremely heterogeneous. This motivated us to ask whether the population representation in either V1 or V4 satisfies three criteria: 1) disk luminance is represented with high fidelity, 2) the context surrounding the disk is also represented, and 3) the representations of disk luminance and context interact to create a representation of lightness that depends on these factors in a manner consistent with human psychophysical judgments of disk lightness. We found that populations of units in both V1 and V4 fulfill the first two criteria, but that we cannot conclude that the two types of information in either area interact in a manner that clearly predicts human psychophysical measurements: the interpretation of our population measurements depends on how subsequent areas read out lightness from the population responses.New & NoteworthyA core question in visual neuroscience is how the brain extracts stable representations of object properties from the retinal image. We searched for a neuronal mechanism of lightness perception by determining whether the responses of neuronal populations in primary visual cortex and area V4 could account for a lightness illusion measured using human psychophysics. Our results suggest that comparing psychophysics with population recordings will yield insight into neuronal mechanisms underlying a variety of perceptual phenomena.

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Altered functional interactions between neurons in primary visual cortex of macaque monkeys with experimental amblyopia

10.1101/604009 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Katerina Acar ◽

Lynne Kiorpes ◽

J. Anthony Movshon ◽

Matthew A. Smith

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Primary Visual Cortex ◽

Visual Processing ◽

Cortical Neurons ◽

Visual Sensitivity ◽

Visual Responses ◽

Macaque Monkeys ◽

Fellow Eye ◽

Neuronal Populations ◽

Evoked Activity

AbstractAmblyopia, a disorder in which vision through one of the eyes is degraded, arises because of defective processing of information by the visual system. Amblyopia often develops in humans after early misalignment of the eyes (strabismus), and can be simulated in macaque monkeys by artificially inducing strabismus. In such amblyopic animals, single-unit responses in primary visual cortex (V1) are appreciably reduced when evoked by the amblyopic eye compared to the other (fellow) eye. However, this degradation in single V1 neuron responsivity is not commensurate with the marked losses in visual sensitivity and resolution measured behaviorally. Here we explored the idea that changes in patterns of coordinated activity across populations of V1 neurons may contribute to degraded visual representations in amblyopia, potentially making it more difficult to read out evoked activity to support perceptual decisions. We studied the visually-evoked activity of V1 neuronal populations in three macaques (M. nemestrina) with strabismic amblyopia and in one control. Activity driven through the amblyopic eye was diminished, and these responses also showed more interneuronal correlation at all stimulus contrasts than responses driven through the fellow eye or responses in the control. A decoding analysis showed that responses driven through the amblyopic eye carried less visual information than other responses. Our results suggest that part of the reduced visual capacity of amblyopes may be due to changes in the patterns of functional interaction among neurons in V1.New and noteworthyAmblyopia is a developmental disorder of visual processing that reduces visual function and changes the visual responses of cortical neurons in macaque monkeys. The neuronal and behavioral changes are not always well correlated. We found that the interactions among neurons in the visual cortex of monkeys with amblyopia are also altered. These changes may contribute to amblyopic visual deficits by diminishing the amount of information relayed by neuronal populations driven by the amblyopic eye.

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