Rune Rasmussen, Keisuke Yonehara's Lab

Keisuke Yonehara’s lab (Dandrite, Aarhus)

A cortical stream for retinal direction selectivity

Abstract: Visual features, such as contrast and object motion, are extracted by parallel circuits in the retina and streamed into higher visual areas (HVAs) of the cerebral cortex. However, a longstanding question is how specialized visual feature representations in HVAs are built, based on the retinal output channels; i.e. what is the causal relationship between retinal feature detectors and cortical visual representation? Using in-vivo two-photon calcium imaging in mice, we have addressed this question by determining the effects of disrupting retinal horizontal direction selectivity on motion-evoked responses in the visual cortex. We show that direction-selective (DS) cells in distinct HVAs are selectively reduced upon retinal manipulation. These effects are to a large extend inherited from projection neurons located in the primary visual cortex, and appears to be carried by thalamic axons arriving in superficial primary visual cortical layers. We have thus identified a cortical processing stream for motion computed in the retina.