Danish Research Institute of Translational Neuroscience-DANDRITE, Nordic-EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine, Department of Biomedicine, Aarhus University, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark.
Nat Commun. 2020 Feb 11;11(1):831. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-14643-z.
Visual features extracted by retinal circuits are streamed into higher visual areas (HVAs) after being processed along the visual hierarchy. However, how specialized neuronal representations of HVAs are built, based on retinal output channels, remained unclear. Here, we addressed this question by determining the effects of genetically disrupting retinal direction selectivity on motion-evoked responses in visual stages from the retina to HVAs in mice. Direction-selective (DS) cells in the rostrolateral (RL) area that prefer higher temporal frequencies, and that change direction tuning bias as the temporal frequency of a stimulus increases, are selectively reduced upon retinal manipulation. DS cells in the primary visual cortex projecting to area RL, but not to the posteromedial area, were similarly affected. Therefore, the specific connectivity of cortico-cortical projection neurons routes feedforward signaling originating from retinal DS cells preferentially to area RL. We thus identify a cortical processing stream for motion computed in the retina.
视网膜回路提取的视觉特征在沿着视觉层级进行处理后，被传入高级视觉区域（HVAs）。然而，基于视网膜输出通道，HVAs 中专门的神经元表示是如何构建的，这一点仍不清楚。在这里，我们通过确定遗传破坏视网膜方向选择性对从视网膜到 HVAs 的小鼠视觉阶段中运动诱发反应的影响来解决这个问题。在对 RL 区（偏头侧的）具有更高时间频率偏好、并且随着刺激的时间频率增加而改变方向调谐偏差的细胞选择性减少。投射到 RL 区而不是后内侧区的初级视觉皮层中的定向选择（DS）细胞也受到类似的影响。因此，皮质-皮质投射神经元的特定连接将源自视网膜 DS 细胞的前馈信号选择性地引导到 RL 区。我们因此确定了一个在视网膜中计算运动的皮质处理流。
