| First Author | Fang Q | Year | 2020 |
| Journal | Neuron | Volume | 105 |
| Issue | 2 | Pages | 355-369.e6 |
| PubMed ID | 31812514 | Mgi Jnum | J:283243 |
| Mgi Id | MGI:6386572 | Doi | 10.1016/j.neuron.2019.10.027 |
| Citation | Fang Q, et al. (2020) A Differential Circuit via Retino-Colliculo-Pulvinar Pathway Enhances Feature Selectivity in Visual Cortex through Surround Suppression. Neuron 105(2):355-369.e6 |
| abstractText | In the mammalian visual system, information from the retina streams into parallel bottom-up pathways. It remains unclear how these pathways interact to contribute to contextual modulation of visual cortical processing. By optogenetic inactivation and activation of mouse lateral posterior nucleus (LP) of thalamus, a homolog of pulvinar, or its projection to primary visual cortex (V1), we found that LP contributes to surround suppression of layer (L) 2/3 responses in V1 by driving L1 inhibitory neurons. This results in subtractive suppression of visual responses and an overall enhancement of orientation, direction, spatial, and size selectivity. Neurons in V1-projecting LP regions receive bottom-up input from the superior colliculus (SC) and respond preferably to non-patterned visual noise. The noise-dependent LP activity allows V1 to "cancel" noise effects and maintain its orientation selectivity under varying noise background. Thus, the retina-SC-LP-V1 pathway forms a differential circuit with the canonical retino-geniculate pathway to achieve context-dependent sharpening of visual representations. |
