ePoster

Feedforward thalamocortical inputs to primary visual cortex are OFF dominant

Jun Zhuang,Naveen Ouellette,R. Clay Reid
COSYNE 2022(2022)
Lisbon, Portugal
Presented: Mar 19, 2022

Conference

COSYNE 2022

Lisbon, Portugal

Resources

Authors & Affiliations

Jun Zhuang,Naveen Ouellette,R. Clay Reid

Abstract

The responses of mammalian visual system to the increment (ON) and decrement (OFF) of light are asymmetrical. Previous studies have shown that the OFF responses in early visual systems of higher mammals are dominant. Recently, the OFF dominance had been shown in mouse primary visual cortex (V1), but it is unclear whether the feedforward inputs from dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) to V1 in mouse are OFF dominant. Here, we labeled thalamocortical projecting cells in dLGN with calcium indicator and imaged their axonal bouton activity at different depths in V1. By using locally sparse noise stimuli to map the ON and OFF receptive fields (RFs) of these boutons in awake head-fixed mice, we found that the OFF boutons were more numerous and had larger response amplitude across all cortical depths recorded (layer 1 through layer 4). To quantify the retinotopic scatter, we measured the difference between the bouton’s RF center and its retinotopic location in visual space. We found that the OFF boutons showed significantly less retinotopic scatter than the ON boutons across cortical depth. This difference was still significant even after the count bias of OFF boutons was controlled by bootstrapping. Finally, pairwise RF distance distributions were plotted to quantify 2D RF distribution. OFF-to-OFF pairs had significantly higher pairwise RF distance than ON-to-ON pairs, indicating OFF RFs formed better mosaic tiling and ON RFs formed randomized clusters. A Monte Carlo simulation of RF distribution in visual space with grid irregularity (gaussian noise, σ) and cluster spread (exponential decay, τ), showed that low irregularity and high spread mimicked the OFF-to-OFF distribution while high irregularity and low spread recapitulated the ON-to-ON distribution. Overall, our results showed the OFF dominance of thalamocortical boutons in counts, response amplitude, retinotopy, and mosaic tiling.

Unique ID: cosyne-22/feedforward-thalamocortical-inputs-aefc9b4e