The response of cortical neurons to a sensory stimulus is modulated by the context. In the visual cortex, for example, stimulation of a pyramidal cell's receptive field surround can attenuate the cell’s response to a stimulus in its receptive field’s center, a phenomenon called surround suppression. Whether cortical circuits contribute to surround suppression or whether the phenomenon is entirely relayed from earlier stages of visual processing is controversial. Here we discover that, in contrast to pyramidal cells, the response of somatostatin expressing inhibitory neurons (SOMs) in the superficial layers of the mouse visual cortex increases with stimulation of the receptive field surround. This difference results from SOMs' preferential excitation by horizontal cortical axons. By perturbing SOMs’ activity, we demonstrate that these neurons contribute to pyramidal cells' surround suppression. These results establish a cortical circuit for surround suppression and attribute a particular function to a genetically defined type of inhibitory neuron.

Summary The response of cortical neurons to a sensory stimulus is shaped by the network in which they are embedded. Here we establish a role of parvalbumin (PV)-expressing cells, a large class of inhibitory neurons that target the soma and perisomatic compartments of pyramidal cells, in controlling cortical responses. By bidirectionally manipulating PV cell activity in visual cortex we show that these neurons strongly modulate layer 2/3 pyramidal cell spiking responses to visual stimuli while only modestly affecting their tuning properties. PV cells' impact on pyramidal cells is captured by a linear transformation, both additive and multiplicative, with a threshold. These results indicate that PV cells are ideally suited to modulate cortical gain and establish a causal relationship between a select neuron type and specific computations performed by the cortex during sensory processing.