MOTION AND ORIENTATION PROCESSING ACROSS VISUAL AREAS AND CELL TYPES IN MOUSE CORTEX

Successfully interacting with a dynamic environment requires the visual system to accurately perceive and interpret moving objects. While previous studies have identified cortical regions involved in motion processing, the underlying neural circuitry and the contribution of distinct cell types remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we collaborated with the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics to generate a large-scale OpenScope 2-photon imaging dataset to probe motion and orientation processing across the mouse visual cortex. We recorded cortical activity across six visual areas, two cortical layers, and four genetically defined cell types while mice passively viewed a set of visual stimuli. These stimuli included drifting gratings and random dot kinematograms (RDKs), enabling direct comparison of orientation- and motion-driven responses. We find that both RDKs and drifting gratings evoke robust responses; however, receptive-field properties, tuning strengths and stimulus preferences vary significantly across cell types, visual areas, and stimulus type. Importantly, neuronal tuning to RDKs and drifting gratings were weakly correlated, suggesting that motion and orientation processing differentially engage neural populations in the mouse visual cortex. Together, this dataset provides a starting point for understanding how motion information is represented across cortical areas and cell types. Its scale enables robust comparative analyses and offers new opportunities to study the circuit-level organization of visual motion processing.

This project was generously supported by an NIH U24 resource grant (U24 NS113646) and funding from the German Research Foundation through the Collaborative Research Centers–Transregional program (CRC-TRR384; project no. 514483642; IN-CODE).