Topic: optogenetic excitation

Working memory (WM) is the brain process for actively maintaining information during a short delay period. Dopamine is known to strongly modulate WM, but its temporal specificity in modulating WM and its related neuronal activity remain elusive. Here we report that dopamine modulates olfactory WM behavior in a bi-directional and timing-dependent manner in head-fixed mice performing a delay-paired association task. In vivo imaging of dopamine levels in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) by a newly developed GPCR-activation-based-dopamine sensor (GRABDA) revealed phasic elevation of mPFC dopami

Substantial progress towards understanding neural computation has been made by studying the dynamical systems that govern neural population activity. Because dynamical models make predictions about the temporal evolution of neural states, perturbations of neural activity are a powerful tool to evaluate and refine these models. Here, using electrodes and Neuropixels in the motor cortices of macaques engaged in a reaching task, we probed how local population dynamics are affected by two perturbation modalities: optogenetic excitation and electrical intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). Both st

Visual attention enhances the neural representation of salient stimuli within the visual cortex. Although it is generally thought that this enhancement is driven by glutamatergic feedback from frontal cortical areas, cortically released neuromodulators are also believed to play a major uncharacterized role. Here we report the unexpected observation that dorsal raphe (DR) derived serotonin (5HT) controls visual attention. We adopted a behavioral model that captured how mice allocated attention to cued and uncued visual features. Simultaneous photometry recordings showed that DR activity decreas