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Authors & Affiliations
Lukas Meyerolbersleben, Anton Sirota, Laura Busse
Abstract
Natural vision involves encoding complex inputs with spatial and temporal variations in luminance and contrast, which vary widely within and across visual scenes. This engages multiple interacting neural circuits that process these features and implement functions like gain control, decorrelation, and contextual prediction. One hallmark of such circuit interactions at the cortical level is that they give rise to fast oscillatory dynamics, which are reflected in the local field potential (LFP). While recent studies in mice have linked oscillations driven by artificial stimuli to specific thalamo-cortical and cortical circuits, a comprehensive analysis of fast oscillatory dynamics in V1 with anatomical and spectrotemporal specificity during naturalistic visual stimulation is still lacking.
Using data from the Allen Neuropixels Visual Coding project (Siegle et al., 2021), we analyzed oscillations in the V1 LFP to identify thalamo-cortical and cortical circuits activated by specific local visual features in naturalistic stimuli. We found that certain visual features were associated with retinotopic V1 oscillatory bursts at distinct laminar locations and frequencies: narrowband-gamma (50–70 Hz) bursts in L4 were linked to local luminance, epsilon (80–180 Hz) bursts in L4 and L5 to local spatial-frequency power, and low-gamma (20–40 Hz) bursts in L4 to optic flow from moving edges. These spectrotemporally and anatomically resolved LFP bursts were associated with distinct phase-coupling patterns of V1 translaminar spiking, suggesting feature-specific circuit motifs. Finally, these circuit motifs occurred across a range of stimuli containing the relevant visual feature, suggesting that they might constitute general modules for feature-specific information flow at a mesoscale circuit level.
We propose that these circuit motifs could contribute to differential and multiplexed coding of complex sensory input and feature-specific information propagation to downstream regions.