A Role for Mouse Primary Visual Cortex in Motion Perception

Abstract

Visual motion is an ethologically important stimulus throughout the animal kingdom. In primates, motion perception relies on specific higher-order cortical regions. Although mouse primary visual cortex (V1) and higher-order visual areas show direction-selective (DS) responses, their role in motion perception remains unknown. Here, we tested whether V1 is involved in motion perception in mice. We developed a head-fixed discrimination task in which mice must report their perceived direction of motion from random dot kinematograms (RDKs). After training, mice made around 90% correct choices for stimuli with high coherence and performed significantly above chance for 16% coherent RDKs. Accuracy increased with both stimulus duration and visual field coverage of the stimulus, suggesting that mice in this task integrate motion information in time and space. Retinal recordings showed that thalamically projecting On-Off DS ganglion cells display DS responses when stimulated with RDKs. Two-photon calcium imaging revealed that neurons in layer (L) 2/3 of V1 display strong DS tuning in response to this stimulus. Thus, RDKs engage motion-sensitive retinal circuits as well as downstream visual cortical areas. Contralateral V1 activity played a key role in this motion direction discrimination task because its reversible inactivation with muscimol led to a significant reduction in performance. Neurometric-psychometric comparisons showed that an ideal observer could solve the task with the information encoded in DS L2/3 neurons. Motion discrimination of RDKs presents a powerful behavioral tool for dissecting the role of retino-forebrain circuits in motion processing.

Neural mechanisms of sensorimotor transformation and action selection

“…Several groups have now successfully devised paradigms for studying evidence accumulation in rats and mice (Brunton et al ., ; Raposo et al ., ; Morcos & Harvey, ; Marques et al ., ; Pinto et al ., ). Specifically, Hanks et al .…”

Endogenous and exogenous control of visuospatial selective attention in freely behaving mice

“…5,6 ). Whereas the mouse, a genetically powerful animal model, has been used to study visually guided behavior [7][8][9] , and recently, circuits for cross-modal attention 10,11 , it has been debated whether mice are capable of exhibiting spatially well-resolved visual behaviors that are necessary to unpack the circuit basis of visuospatial attention, with just one recent study reporting success 6 .…”

Distributed and Retinotopically Asymmetric Processing of Coherent Motion in Mouse Visual Cortex

“…In addition, strong orientation tuning and direction selectivity are already present in the lateral geniculate nucleus [33][34][35], in contrast to the weakly tuned LGN neurons found in primates [36]. Finally, in contrast to primate V1 [9,18], mouse V1 contains a significant fraction of neurons that exhibit tuned responses to global coherent motion found in RDKs [3] and plaid pattern motion ( [37,38], though see [39]).…”

“…Although neurons selective for visual motion arise early in the visual system, extensive research in primates has shown that perception of coherent global motion independent of local motion relies on processing in specialized regions of visual cortex [1,2]. The cortical processing of coherent motion has been studied extensively in primates, but is not as well understood in the mouse, [1,2] although mouse visual cortical neurons are known to be well-tuned for coherent visual motion [3,4], and vision plays an important role in navigation [5], but the cortical organization of coherent motion processing is poorly understood. Recently developed techniques for measuring and manipulating neural activity in genetically identified neurons makes the mouse an attractive model system for investigating the neural circuitry underlying coherent motion processing [6,7].…”