Topic: Visual cortical neurons

What we expect to see can greatly affect what we perceive. How does expectation influence local circuitry among visual cortical neurons to allow for perceptual discrimination in the context of rich natural inputs? Little work has sought to understand how populations of sensory cortical neurons change their responses with expectation, and the majority of studies manipulate expectation in a task-irrelevant way, disallowing for comparisons of changes in neural activity with behavioral performance. Theoretical and experimental work indicates that changes at the population level, in particular thos

Visual cortical neurons are known to encode the position and motion direction of specific stimuli retrospectively, without any locomotion or task demand. Hippocampus, though receives projections from these visual cortical areas, is hypothesized to require self-motion or cognitive task to generate allocentric spatial selectivity that is abstract and prospective. In an attempt to bridge these disparities, we measured hippocampal responses to a moving bar of light in a body-fixed rat, without imposing any task demand on the animal. For a revolving bar, about 70% of dorsal CA1 neurons showed stabl

Visual cortical neurons are richly inter-connected by within-area, and feedforward and feedback across-area circuits. How these different circuits contribute to visual function remains poorly understood. We performed simultaneous recordings from hundreds of neurons in V1 and V2 in anesthetized macaque monkeys. Using a latent variable model, we identified the feedforward, feedback, and within-area signals that contributed to the measured responses. The identified feedforward and feedback signals contributed equally to explaining activity in the two areas, consistent with their equal anatomical