Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2, Canada.
Neurosci Lett. 2012 Oct 24;528(2):165-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2012.09.006. Epub 2012 Sep 17.
The neural correlates of visual motion perception have historically been studied in non-human primates. However, the mouse has recently gained popularity as a model for studying vision primarily driven by the hope that the genetic tools available in this species may contribute to our understanding of visual processing in the cortex. A recent calcium-imaging study on the spatiotemporal tuning of mouse striate and extrastriate cortex revealed that neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) were almost never speed tuned, whereas previous electrophysiological studies in macaques noted around one quarter of V1 neurons appeared to be selective for a particular stimulus speed. We were interested in whether this discrepancy was due to methodological or species differences, so we measured the spatiotemporal tuning of mouse V1 neurons using standard electrophysiological techniques. Using comparable analyses to previous studies of speed tuning, our data showed that speed tuning is rare in mouse V1, which corroborates earlier studies in mouse and points to a species difference in motion processing in early cortex between macaques and other mammals.
视觉运动感知的神经相关性在历史上一直是在非人类灵长类动物中进行研究的。然而，由于希望该物种中可用的遗传工具可能有助于我们理解皮层中的视觉处理，因此老鼠最近已成为研究视觉的模型而受到关注。最近一项关于老鼠纹状和纹外皮层的时空调谐的钙成像研究表明，初级视觉皮层 (V1) 中的神经元几乎从不对速度进行调谐，而之前在猕猴中进行的电生理研究表明，大约四分之一的 V1 神经元似乎对特定的刺激速度具有选择性。我们想知道这种差异是由于方法学还是物种差异造成的，因此我们使用标准的电生理技术测量了老鼠 V1 神经元的时空调谐。使用与之前的速度调谐研究类似的分析，我们的数据表明，速度调谐在老鼠 V1 中很少见，这与老鼠的早期研究结果相吻合，并表明在灵长类动物和其他哺乳动物的早期皮层中，运动处理存在物种差异。
