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Selective processing of relevant visual information: the effects of learning and attentional task-switching on the neural response selectivity and interactions of different cell classes in mouse primary visual cortex| old_uid | 14283 |
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| title | Selective processing of relevant visual information: the effects of learning and attentional task-switching on the neural response selectivity and interactions of different cell classes in mouse primary visual cortex |
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| start_date | 2017/09/04 |
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| schedule | 11h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Our brain is constantly overloaded with sensory input but it has limited processing capacity. We therefore need to select those objects that are most relevant for behaviour.
We recently found that neuronal responses in the mouse primary visual cortex (V1) become increasingly selective when animals learn the behavioural relevance of novel visual stimuli, by repeatedly imaging cells using 2?photon calcium imaging while mice learned a visual discrimination task (Poort et al., 2015, Neuron). However, it is unclear how learning reorganises the activity of different cell types, including excitatory pyramidal neurons and different classes of GABAergic interneurons. Although pyramidal cells provide the output from the local circuit to other cortical areas, different interneuron classes can inhibit pyramidal cells as well as each other, and thus exert a powerful influence on circuit activity. We therefore simultaneously measured responses in V1 of pyramidal cells and parvalbumin, somatostatin and vasoactive intestinal peptide expressing interneurons.
Our results show that learning leads to changes in the selectivity and co?activation patterns across multiple cell classes, and that increased stimulus?specific inhibition, especially in parvalbumin cells, can contribute to selective processing of relevant objects. To determine whether these changes were specific to learning, we trained the same mice to switch between a visual and an olfactory discrimination task to compare neural responses when animals were attending or ignoring the same visual stimuli. We found that the effects of learning and attentional switching on the response selectivity of the same cells were uncorrelated. Furthermore, learning and attentional switching differentially affected the interactions between different cell classes. These results suggest that there are distinct mechanisms underlying the increased discriminability of relevant sensory stimuli across longer and shorter time scales. |
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| responsibles | Blancho |
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