Neuron
Volume 105, Issue 2, 22 January 2020, Pages 355-369.e6
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Article
A Differential Circuit via Retino-Colliculo-Pulvinar Pathway Enhances Feature Selectivity in Visual Cortex through Surround Suppression

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2019.10.027Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • LP enhances feature selectivity in V1 by providing subtractive surround suppression

  • This suppression is mediated by LP innervation of layer 1 inhibitory neurons in V1

  • The bottom-up retina-SC-LP-V1 pathway constructs a differential visual circuit

  • LP helps V1 maintain its orientation selectivity under varying noise background

Summary

In the mammalian visual system, information from the retina streams into parallel bottom-up pathways. It remains unclear how these pathways interact to contribute to contextual modulation of visual cortical processing. By optogenetic inactivation and activation of mouse lateral posterior nucleus (LP) of thalamus, a homolog of pulvinar, or its projection to primary visual cortex (V1), we found that LP contributes to surround suppression of layer (L) 2/3 responses in V1 by driving L1 inhibitory neurons. This results in subtractive suppression of visual responses and an overall enhancement of orientation, direction, spatial, and size selectivity. Neurons in V1-projecting LP regions receive bottom-up input from the superior colliculus (SC) and respond preferably to non-patterned visual noise. The noise-dependent LP activity allows V1 to “cancel” noise effects and maintain its orientation selectivity under varying noise background. Thus, the retina-SC-LP-V1 pathway forms a differential circuit with the canonical retino-geniculate pathway to achieve context-dependent sharpening of visual representations.

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