Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 37, Issue 14, Pages 3764-3775Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2728-16.2017
Keywords
cortical state; decorrelation; gain; locomotion; visual cortex
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Funding
- Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain Grant
- Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain Fellowship
- National Eye Institute Grant [R01 EY02874]
- RPB Stein Innovation Award
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Neurons in mouse primary visual cortex (V1) are selective for particular properties of visual stimuli. Locomotion causes a change in cortical state that leaves their selectivity unchanged but strengthens their responses. Both locomotion and the change in cortical state are thought to be initiated by projections from the mesencephalic locomotor region, the latter through a disinhibitory circuit in V1. By recording simultaneously from a large number of single neurons in alert mice viewing moving gratings, we investigated the relationship between locomotion and the information contained within the neural population. Wefound that locomotion improved encoding of visual stimuli in V1 by two mechanisms. First, locomotion-induced increases in firing rates enhanced the mutual information between visual stimuli and single neuron responses over a fixed window of time. Second, stimulus discriminability was improved, even for fixed population firing rates, because of a decrease in noise correlations across the population. These two mechanisms contributed differently to improvements in discriminability across cortical layers, with changes in firing rates most important in the upper layers and changes in noise correlations most important in layer V. Together, these changes resulted in a threefold to fivefold reduction in the time needed to precisely encode grating direction and orientation. These results support the hypothesis that cortical state shifts during locomotion to accommodate an increased load on the visual system when mice are moving.
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