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Visual and tactile integration of object locations in the mouse cortex

Adrian Hoffmann, Fritjof Helmchen

Date / Location: Tuesday, 12 July 2022 / S05-460
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For a stable and coherent perception of the world, the brain combines sensory information from different modalities using distinct reference frames. In the mouse brain, tactile information from the snout’s vibrissae passes through the thalamus to the somatotopically organized primary whisker somatosensory cortex (wS1) while the primary visual cortex (V1) contains a retinotopic map of the visual field. For nearby objects, these two sensory streams likely converge in the rostro-lateral (RL) area of the posterior parietal cortex. How such converging multisensory inputs are integrated on a single-cell level, especially for naturalistic stimuli, remains unclear. Here, we investigated how neurons in mouse wS1, V1, and RL integrate visuotactile information about a pole in reach of the whiskers that can be seen and/or felt. Using two-photon calcium imaging, we recorded neurons in L2/3 of head-fixed mice while tracking whisker-pole interactions. Simultaneously, we recorded neural spikes and local field potentials from the primary and secondary thalamus (VPM, PO) by chronically implanting a 64-channel linear array of flexible electrodes. By comparing average activities at different pole locations, we find that subsets of neurons in RL and wS1 show selectivity for specific locations in the near space based on tactile and/or visual input. Using Generalized Linear Models, we find neural activity in RL better predicted by object locations than by whisker kinematics, whereas the opposite holds for wS1. Together, these findings corroborate the notion of RL representing object locations based on visual and tactile information, potentially in a more modality-invariant manner.

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