Evaluating Visual Cues Modulates Their Representation in Mouse Visual and Cingulate Cortex

Abstract

Choosing an action in response to visual cues relies on cognitive processes, such as perception, evaluation, and prediction, which can modulate visual representations even at early processing stages. In the mouse, it is challenging to isolate cognitive modulations of sensory signals because concurrent overt behavior patterns, such as locomotion, can also have brainwide influences. To address this challenge, we designed a task, in which head-fixed mice had to evaluate one of two visual cues. While their global shape signaled the opportunity to earn reward, the cues provided equivalent local stimulation to receptive fields of neurons in primary visual (V1) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We found that mice evaluated these cues within few hundred milliseconds. During this period, ;30% of V1 neurons became cue-selective, with preferences for either cue being balanced across the recorded population. This selectivity emerged in response to the behavioral demands because the same neurons could not discriminate the cues in sensory control measurements. In ACC, cue evaluation affected a similar fraction of neurons; emerging selectivity, however, was stronger than in V1, and preferences in the recorded population were biased toward the cue promising reward. Such a biased selectivity regime might allow the mouse to infer the promise of reward simply by the overall level of activity. Together, these experiments isolate the impact of task demands on neural responses in mouse cerebral cortex, and document distinct neural signatures of cue evaluation in V1 and ACC.

To be and not to be: Wide-field Ca2+ imaging reveals neocortical functional segmentation combines stability and flexibility

“…The anterior motor areas covered by timescale-specific ICs are involved in planning and decision making (Svoboda and Li 2018;Inagaki et al 2022;Xu et al 2022;Yin et al 2022). The visual areas and posterior parietal regions are critical for both vision and sensory-motor integration (Beloozerova and Sirota 2003;Freedman and Ibos 2018;Steinmetz et al 2019;Wal et al 2021).…”

Challenging Paradigms Through Ecological Neuroscience: Lessons From Visual Models

“…An excellent example of balance between ecological validity and variable control is the research carried out by Wal et al ( 2021 ). Authors investigated how behavioral demands could influence the selectivity to visual stimuli of cortical neurons.…”

“…This highlights the importance of noting the animal's internal state in how the brain processes such visual stimuli. In this sense, Wal et al ( 2021 ) presented two visual cues that provided equivalent stimulation to V1 neuron's RF. Their experiment showed that neuronal activity in response to the two cues was equivalent without a rewarding context.…”

“…This highlights that there is no clear correspondence between the visual stimulus and the activity of the V1 neurons that supposedly encode it. Instead, their activity is better aligned with the animal's context and behavior (Chubykin et al, 2013 ; Leinweber et al, 2017 ; Huda et al, 2020 ; Wal et al, 2021 ). In other words, if we did not know the context associated with the stimulus (such as the mouse eye position, or its goal-oriented behavior), it would not be possible to determine the nature of the stimulus by just looking at the brain activity.…”

Visuomotor learning promotes visually evoked activity in the medial prefrontal cortex

“…Supporting the role of the mPFC in learning sensorimotor associations, the mPFC exhibits sensory responses specifically to stimuli that are behaviorally relevant (Bichot et al, 1996;Wal et al, 2021). These stimuli can be of any modality including visual (Orsolic et al, 2021;Peters et al, 2021;Reinert et al, 2021), auditory (Moorman and Aston-Jones, 2015;Pinto and Dan, 2015), somatosensory (Le Merre et al, 2018), and even multisensory (Coen et al, 2021).…”