Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Phivos Phylactou, Andria Shimi, Nikos Konstantinou
Summary: This study investigated the role of the sensory visual cortex in visual short-term memory using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The results showed inhibitory effects of TMS on the sensory visual cortex during the early (200 ms) and late (1000 ms) maintenance phase, supporting the theory of sensory recruitment in which perceptual and memory processes rely on the same neural substrates in the sensory visual cortex.
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Jan Homann, Sue Ann Koay, Kevin S. Chen, David W. Tank, Michael J. Berry
Summary: By recording and observing the activity of neurons in the mouse primary visual cortex, researchers have found that novel images can elicit excessive activity in most neurons, with this novelty response rapidly emerging and having a specific duration. When new image sets are repeatedly presented, the neuronal activity gradually stabilizes. Furthermore, the study reveals that under certain conditions, neural circuits have the capacity to store approximately 15 familiar images.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Amy M. Ni, Brittany S. Bowes, Douglas A. Ruff, Marlene R. Cohen
Summary: Most systems neuroscience studies can be categorized into basic science work and translational work. This study combines these two approaches and reveals that orally administered methylphenidate enhances spatially selective visual attention and improves visual performance. Furthermore, it suggests that decreased correlated variability of neurons may be a general mechanism for treating neuropsychiatric disorders.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2022)
Review
Clinical Neurology
Hannah R. Monday, Han Chin Wang, Daniel E. Feldman
Summary: This study analyzed multiple transgenic mouse models of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to investigate the convergence of deficits in neural circuit function. The findings revealed heightened innate sensory detection behavior and impaired sensory discrimination behavior across many ASD models. Neurophysiologically, hypofunction of parvalbumin (PV) interneurons and increased excitation-inhibition (E-I) ratio were prevalent, but hyperexcitability and excess spiking were rarely observed. Instead, sensory tuning and other aspects of neural coding were commonly degraded, which may explain the impaired discrimination behavior. Two distinct phenotypic clusters with opposing neural circuit signatures were evident. These findings may contribute to the development of tailored therapeutic approaches for autism.
FRONTIERS IN NEUROLOGY
(2023)
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Ilaria Tonazzini, Chiara Cerri, Ambra Del Grosso, Sara Antonini, Manuela Allegra, Matteo Caleo, Marco Cecchini
Summary: This study provides a comprehensive characterization of morphological and functional alterations in the visual system of Twitcher (TWI) mouse model of Krabbe disease. The findings demonstrate defective basic functional properties in the primary visual cortex, along with specific neuropathological alterations and increasing PSY accumulation over time in the brain and optic nerves.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Kara J. Emery, Vicki J. Volbrecht, David H. Peterzell, Michael A. Webster
Summary: The coordinate frames for color and motion are often defined by three dimensions, but the organizational principles for the representation of hue and motion direction are profoundly different.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Matthias Fritsche, Samuel G. Solomon, Floris P. de Lange
Summary: Visual processing is influenced by recent stimulus history, and the visual system optimizes encoding by exploiting the temporal statistics of the world. Neurons in the early visual cortex maintain long-term memory traces of individual stimuli, leading to long-term and stimulus-specific adaptation.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Mathematical & Computational Biology
Yizhou Xie, Sadra Sadeh
Summary: This study systematically assessed visual coding in the mouse brain and revealed the spectrum of visual information across brain areas and behavioural states. Visual cortical areas showed the highest classification accuracies, followed by thalamic and midbrain regions, while hippocampal regions had close to chance accuracy. Behavioral variability led to a decrease in decoding accuracy and similar behavioral states improved the performance of the decoders.
FRONTIERS IN COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Aaron M. Williams, Christopher F. Angeloni, Maria N. Geffen
Summary: In this study, the researchers investigated how sound and movement interact to modulate V1 visual responses in awake, head-fixed mice. They found that sound modulated the activity of a large percentage of light-responsive neurons, with most neurons increasing their activity in the presence of auditory stimuli. The study also revealed that sound and movement had distinct and complementary effects on neuronal visual responses, improving the decoding of visual stimuli from neuronal activity. These findings enhance our understanding of multimodal processing in the awake brain and clarify the potential confounding role of movement in neuronal audiovisual responses.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Michael R. Bale, Malamati Bitzidou, Elena Giusto, Paul Kinghorn, Miguel Maravall
Summary: The study investigates how cortical neuronal activity supports sequence discrimination through tasks conducted on mice, showing that mice can respond to the earliest cues when distinguishing sequences and enhance their performance in later responses. In the primary somatosensory barrel cortex (S1bf), neuron activity reflects the learned association between target sequence and licking rather than a refined representation of sensory features.
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Fabian A. Mikulasch, Lucas Rudelt, Viola Priesemann
Summary: This study suggests that visuomotor mismatch responses in the primary visual cortex can be explained as a cooperation between motor and visual areas in jointly explaining optic flow. Neurons in V1 only represent external causes of optic flow, enabling the detection of movements independent of the animal's own locomotion.
NEURAL COMPUTATION
(2022)
Article
Biology
Liping Yu, Jiawei Hu, Chenlin Shi, Li Zhou, Maozhi Tian, Jiping Zhang, Jinghong Xu
Summary: The study demonstrates the essential role of auditory cortex in information encoding and maintenance during an auditory working memory task, particularly in the early delay period.
Review
Neurosciences
Tiberiu Tesileanu, Eugenio Piasini, Vijay Balasubramanian
Summary: This article reviews recent findings that demonstrate the adaptation of central circuits in the visual brain to key aspects of natural scenes. It also discusses the potential role of adapting to natural temporal statistics in learning and representing visual objects, and proposes two challenges for future research.
FRONTIERS IN CELLULAR NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Yang Zhou, Ou Zhu, David J. Freedman
Summary: In this study, reversible pharmacological inactivation of LIP neural activity was used to investigate its role in visual categorical decisions. The results showed that LIP plays a generalized role in these decisions, independent of task structure and motor response modality.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Biology
Sacha Sokoloski, Amir Aschner, Ruben Coen-Cagli
Summary: This paper proposes a response model based on mixture models and exponential families, which can capture the variability and covariability in large-scale neural recordings. Additionally, the model facilitates accurate Bayesian decoding, provides a closed-form expression for the Fisher information, and is compatible with theories of probabilistic population coding.
Article
Neurosciences
Edward Zagha, Jeffrey C. Erlich, Soohyun Lee, Gyorgy Lur, Daniel H. O'Connor, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Carsen Stringer, Hongdian Yang
Summary: Recent studies have found that movement-related activity is present throughout the mouse brain, including early sensory areas. Failing to consider movement when interpreting neuronal function may lead to misattributing activity to other processes. Functional couplings between movement and other activities make it difficult to fully isolate sensory, motor, and cognitive-related activity.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Yan-Liang Shi, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Tirin Moore, Kwabena Boahen, Tatiana A. Engel
Summary: Correlated activity fluctuations in the neocortex influence sensory responses and behavior. We measured correlations within columns in the visual cortex and found that these correlations can be explained by columnar On-Off dynamics. Our study reveals how the interactions between cortical state dynamics, anatomical connectivity, and attention give rise to spatially structured patterns of correlated variability.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Elizabeth A. Souter, Yen-Chu Chen, Vivien Zell, Valeria Lallai, Thomas Steinkellner, William S. Conrad, William Wisden, Kenneth D. Harris, Christie D. Fowler, Thomas S. Hnasko
Summary: This study demonstrates that glutamate corelease from cholinergic neurons in the medial habenula opposes nicotine self-administration, providing further support for targeting this synapse to develop potential treatments for nicotine addiction.
Article
Neurosciences
Anwar O. Nunez-Elizalde, Michael Krumin, Charu Bai Reddy, Gabriel Montaldo, Alan Urban, Kenneth D. Harris, Matteo Carandini
Summary: Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) is an effective method for measuring blood flow and inferring brain activity, showing a strong correlation with slow fluctuations in neural firing rate. The study found that fUSI signals are accurately predicted by the smoothed firing rate of local neurons, particularly inhibitory neurons, and match neural firing spatially across different brain regions.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Stephane Bugeon, Joshua Duffield, Mario Dipoppa, Anne Ritoux, Isabelle Prankerd, Dimitris Nicoloutsopoulos, David Orme, Maxwell Shinn, Han Peng, Hamish Forrest, Aiste Viduolyte, Charu Bai Reddy, Yoh Isogai, Matteo Carandini, Kenneth D. Harris
Summary: This study reveals that inhibitory subtypes in the primary visual cortex exhibit diverse correlates with brain state. These subtypes' activity patterns are organized by the main axis of transcriptomic variation. Different subtypes show significant differences in response to visual stimuli, as well as modulation by brain state. These findings highlight the importance of inhibitory neurons in cortical processing.
Editorial Material
Neurosciences
Sonja Gruen, Jennifer Li, Bruce McNaughton, Carl Petersen, David McCormick, Drew Robson, Gyorgy Buzsaki, Kenneth Harris, Terrence Sejnowski, Thomas Mrsic-Flogel, Henrik Linden, Per E. Roland
Summary: This article provides an overview of recent discoveries on the spatial interaction between neurons and networks of neurons, and explains the importance of these interactions in fundamental brain and brainstem mechanisms underlying detection, perception, learning, and behavior.
Article
Neurosciences
Julie J. Lee, Michael Krumin, Kenneth D. Harris, Matteo Carandini
Summary: Participation of neurons in the parietal cortex is task-specific, which is determined by the physical context.
Correction
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Stephane Bugeon, Joshua Duffield, Mario Dipoppa, Anne Ritoux, Isabelle Prankerd, Dimitris Nicoloutsopoulos, David Orme, Maxwell Shinn, Han Peng, Hamish Forrest, Aiste Viduolyte, Charu Bai Reddy, Yoh Isogai, Matteo Carandini, Kenneth D. Harris
Article
Cell Biology
Andrew J. Peters, Andrada-Maria Marica, Julie M. J. Fabre, Kenneth D. Harris, Matteo Carandini
Summary: This study reveals that learning a motor task promotes a pathway for visual information to reach the prefrontal cortex, and the correlation between the cortical response to stimuli and the learned movements increases gradually during training.
Article
Neurosciences
Celian Bimbard, Timothy P. H. Sit, Anna Lebedeva, Charu B. B. Reddy, Kenneth D. D. Harris, Matteo Carandini
Summary: Sensory cortices are considered to be multisensory, as they can be influenced by stimuli of multiple modalities. This study shows that the activity evoked by sounds in the primary visual cortex (V1) is stereotyped across neurons and mice, independent of projections from the auditory cortex. The low-dimensional nature of this activity contrasts with the high-dimensional code used by V1 for representing images. Furthermore, the sound-evoked activity can be accurately predicted by small body movements that are consistent across trials and mice, suggesting that apparent multisensory neural activity may arise from low-dimensional signals associated with internal state and behavior.
NATURE NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Roxana Zeraati, Yan-Liang Shi, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Marc A. Gieselmann, Alexander Thiele, Tirin Moore, Anna Levina, Tatiana A. Engel
Summary: This study investigates the changes in intrinsic timescales during cognitive tasks. The authors demonstrate that intrinsic timescales of neural activity in the visual cortex change with spatial attention. The results suggest that attentional modulation of timescales is due to changes in the efficacy of recurrent interactions.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2023)
Article
Biology
David J. Ottenheimer, Madelyn M. Hjort, Anna J. Bowen, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Garret D. Stuber
Summary: This study demonstrates the stable encoding of cue-reward learning by individual prefrontal neurons and reveals a certain advantage of the prefrontal cortex in value coding.
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Stefano Recanatesi, Serena Bradde, Vijay Balasubramanian, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Eric Shea-Brown
Summary: This passage introduces a scale-dependent participation ratio method to determine the dimensionality of systems at different scales, which can be applied to various systems and studies of brain activity.