Higher brain functions served by the lowly rodent primary visual cortex

Abstract

It has been more than 50 years since the first description of ocular dominance plasticity-the profound modification of primary visual cortex (V1) following temporary monocular deprivation. This discovery immediately attracted the intense interest of neurobiologists focused on the general question of how experience and deprivation modify the brain as a potential substrate for learning and memory. The pace of discovery has quickened considerably in recent years as mice have become the preferred species to study visual cortical plasticity, and new studies have overturned the dogma that primary sensory cortex is immutable after a developmental critical period. Recent work has shown that, in addition to ocular dominance plasticity, adult visual cortex exhibits several forms of response modification previously considered the exclusive province of higher cortical areas. These "higher brain functions" include neural reports of stimulus familiarity, reward-timing prediction, and spatiotemporal sequence learning. Primary visual cortex can no longer be viewed as a simple visual feature detector with static properties determined during early development. Rodent V1 is a rich and dynamic cortical area in which functions normally associated only with "higher" brain regions can be studied at the mechanistic level.

Neural Correlates of Cognition in Primary Visual versus Neighboring Posterior Cortices during Visual Evidence-Accumulation-based Navigation

“…To irst order, the visual cortical hierarchy is thought to process sensory data in order to extract increasingly abstract visual features, although recent work has shown this processing to be modi iable by motor feedback, temporal statistics, learned associations, and attentional control (Roelfsema and de Lange 2016;Gilbert and Sigman 2007;Kimura 2012;Gavornik and Bear 2014;Keller and Mrsic-Flogel 2018;Glickfeld and Olsen 2017;Niell and Stryker 2010;Saleem et al 2013;Shuler and Bear 2006;Fiser et al 2016;Haefner, Berkes, and Fiser 2016;T. S. Lee and Mumford 2003;Zhang et al 2014;Saleem et al 2018;Makino and Komiyama 2015;Keller, Bonhoeffer, and Hübener 2012;Poort et al 2015;Li, Piech, and Gilbert 2004;Stănişor et al 2013;Petreanu et al 2012;Romo et al 2002;Luna et al 2005;Nienborg, Cohen, and Cumming 2012;Yang et al 2016;Britten et al 1996) .…”

A large-scale, standardized physiological survey reveals higher order coding throughout the mouse visual cortex

“…The field has a growing body of evidence showing that the canonical model needs to be enhanced to support more sophisticated visual computation. 5,31 For instance, neurons in mouse V1 show complex visual responses previously associated with higher cortical areas, including pattern selectivity for plaid stimuli 33 Furthermore, the emergence of the rodent as a prominent model of the visual system in recent years has revealed evidence of non-visual computation, including behavioral responses such as reward timing and sequence learning 34 , as well as modulation by multimodal sensory stimuli 35,36 and motor signals. 23,24,37–39…”

NMDAR-dependent emergence of behavioral representation in primary visual cortex

“…Most previous investigations of functional plasticity in V1 during learning have focused on modifications of sensory representations by neuronal activity. In both primates and rodents, repeated association between a visual stimulus and reward results in modification of feature selectivity (e.g., orientation preference) by single neurons [6][7][8][10][11][12][13][14][15] . Such representations are also strongly shaped by top-down influences reflecting levels of arousal or attention 3,4,16 , and prior stimulus expectation 17,18 .…”