Mouse visual cortex contains a region of enhanced spatial resolution

Enny H. van Beest; Sreedeep Mukherjee; Lisa Kirchberger; Ulf H. Schnabel; Chris van der Togt; Rob R.M. Teeuwen; Areg Barsegyan; Arne F. Meyer; Jasper Poort; Pieter R. Roelfsema; Matthew W. Self

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-24311-5

Mouse visual cortex contains a region of enhanced spatial resolution

Enny H. van Beest
, Sreedeep Mukherjee
, Lisa Kirchberger
, Ulf H. Schnabel
, Chris van der Togt
, Rob R.M. Teeuwen
, Areg Barsegyan
, Arne F. Meyer
, Jasper Poort
, Pieter R. Roelfsema^*
, Matthew W. Self

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

The representation of space in mouse visual cortex was thought to be relatively uniform. Here we reveal, using population receptive-field (pRF) mapping techniques, that mouse visual cortex contains a region in which pRFs are considerably smaller. This region, the “focea,” represents a location in space in front of, and slightly above, the mouse. Using two-photon imaging we show that the smaller pRFs are due to lower scatter of receptive-fields at the focea and an over-representation of binocular regions of space. We show that receptive-fields of single-neurons in areas LM and AL are smaller at the focea and that mice have improved visual resolution in this region of space. Furthermore, freely moving mice make compensatory eye-movements to hold this region in front of them. Our results indicate that mice have spatial biases in their visual processing, a finding that has important implications for the use of the mouse model of vision.

Original language	English
Article number	4029
Pages (from-to)	1-17
Number of pages	17
Journal	Nature Communications
Volume	12
Early online date	29 Jun 2021
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24311-5
Publication status	Published - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).

Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Funding

We thank the animal caretakers at the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience for their assistance. We would like to thank Alexander Heimel for his advice and assistance with the electrophysiology setup and Christiaan Levelt for assistance with breeding of the mouse lines. We thank Serge Dumoulin for his advice on analysis of pRF mapping data. The work was supported by NWO (ALW grant 823-02-010) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 and FP7 Research and Innovation Program (grant agreement 7202070 “Human Brain Project SGA1, SGA2 and SGA3,” ERC grant agreement 339490 “Corti-c_al_gorithms,” and the Erasmus Mundus “NeuroTime” program) and the Stichting Vrienden van het Herseninstituut. A. F. M. was supported by the Radboud Excellence Initiative. J. P. is a Wellcome Trust and Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow (211258/Z/ 18/Z).

Funders	Funder number
Stichting Vrienden van het Herseninstituut
European Commission
Erasmus+
European Research Council
Seventh Framework Programme	339490
NWO	823.02.010
FP7 Research and Innovation Program	7202070
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme	945539

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title = "Mouse visual cortex contains a region of enhanced spatial resolution",

abstract = "The representation of space in mouse visual cortex was thought to be relatively uniform. Here we reveal, using population receptive-field (pRF) mapping techniques, that mouse visual cortex contains a region in which pRFs are considerably smaller. This region, the “focea,” represents a location in space in front of, and slightly above, the mouse. Using two-photon imaging we show that the smaller pRFs are due to lower scatter of receptive-fields at the focea and an over-representation of binocular regions of space. We show that receptive-fields of single-neurons in areas LM and AL are smaller at the focea and that mice have improved visual resolution in this region of space. Furthermore, freely moving mice make compensatory eye-movements to hold this region in front of them. Our results indicate that mice have spatial biases in their visual processing, a finding that has important implications for the use of the mouse model of vision.",

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AU - Teeuwen, Rob R.M.

AU - Barsegyan, Areg

AU - Meyer, Arne F.

AU - Poort, Jasper

AU - Roelfsema, Pieter R.

AU - Self, Matthew W.

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Mouse visual cortex contains a region of enhanced spatial resolution

Abstract

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