Dataset Information

Highly selective receptive fields in mouse visual cortex.

ABSTRACT: Genetic methods available in mice are likely to be powerful tools in dissecting cortical circuits. However, the visual cortex, in which sensory coding has been most thoroughly studied in other species, has essentially been neglected in mice perhaps because of their poor spatial acuity and the lack of columnar organization such as orientation maps. We have now applied quantitative methods to characterize visual receptive fields in mouse primary visual cortex V1 by making extracellular recordings with silicon electrode arrays in anesthetized mice. We used current source density analysis to determine laminar location and spike waveforms to discriminate putative excitatory and inhibitory units. We find that, although the spatial scale of mouse receptive fields is up to one or two orders of magnitude larger, neurons show selectivity for stimulus parameters such as orientation and spatial frequency that is near to that found in other species. Furthermore, typical response properties such as linear versus nonlinear spatial summation (i.e., simple and complex cells) and contrast-invariant tuning are also present in mouse V1 and correlate with laminar position and cell type. Interestingly, we find that putative inhibitory neurons generally have less selective, and nonlinear, responses. This quantitative description of receptive field properties should facilitate the use of mouse visual cortex as a system to address longstanding questions of visual neuroscience and cortical processing.

SUBMITTER: Niell CM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3040721 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Highly selective receptive fields in mouse visual cortex.

Niell Cristopher M CM Stryker Michael P MP

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 20080701 30

Genetic methods available in mice are likely to be powerful tools in dissecting cortical circuits. However, the visual cortex, in which sensory coding has been most thoroughly studied in other species, has essentially been neglected in mice perhaps because of their poor spatial acuity and the lack of columnar organization such as orientation maps. We have now applied quantitative methods to characterize visual receptive fields in mouse primary visual cortex V1 by making extracellular recordings ...[more]

PMID: 18650330

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Project description:A central question in sensory neuroscience is how neurons represent complex natural stimuli. This process involves multiple steps of feature extraction to obtain a condensed, categorical representation useful for classification and behaviour. It has previously been shown that central auditory neurons in the starling have composite receptive fields composed of multiple features. Whether this property is an idiosyncratic characteristic of songbirds, a group of highly specialized vocal learners or a generic property of sensory processing is unknown. To address this question, we have recorded responses from auditory cortical neurons in mice, and characterized their receptive fields using mouse ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) as a natural and ethologically relevant stimulus and pitch-shifted starling songs as a natural but ethologically irrelevant control stimulus. We have found that these neurons display composite receptive fields with multiple excitatory and inhibitory subunits. Moreover, this was the case with either the conspecific or the heterospecific vocalizations. We then trained the sparse filtering algorithm on both classes of natural stimuli to obtain statistically optimal features, and compared the natural and artificial features using UMAP, a dimensionality-reduction algorithm previously used to analyse mouse USVs and birdsongs. We have found that the receptive-field features obtained with both types of the natural stimuli clustered together, as did the sparse-filtering features. However, the natural and artificial receptive-field features clustered mostly separately. Based on these results, our general conclusion is that composite receptive fields are not a unique characteristic of specialized vocal learners but are likely a generic property of central auditory systems. KEY POINTS: Auditory cortical neurons in the mouse have composite receptive fields with several excitatory and inhibitory features. Receptive-field features capture temporal and spectral modulations of natural stimuli. Ethological relevance of the stimulus affects the estimation of receptive-field dimensionality.

Dataset Information

Highly selective receptive fields in mouse visual cortex.

Publications

Highly selective receptive fields in mouse visual cortex.

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