Allen Institute, Seattle, WA 98109.
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195.
eNeuro. 2021 Feb 25;8(1). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0188-20.2021. Print 2021 Jan-Feb.
Neurophysiology studies require the use of inclusion criteria to identify neurons responsive to the experimental stimuli. Five recent studies used calcium imaging to measure the preferred tuning properties of layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons in mouse visual areas. These five studies employed different inclusion criteria and reported different, sometimes conflicting results. Here, we examine how different inclusion criteria can impact reported tuning properties, modifying inclusion criteria to select different subpopulations from the same dataset of almost 17,000 layer 2/3 neurons from the Allen Brain Observatory. The choice of inclusion criteria greatly affected the mean tuning properties of the resulting subpopulations; indeed, the differences in mean tuning because of inclusion criteria were often of comparable magnitude to the differences between studies. In particular, the mean preferred temporal frequencies (TFs) of visual areas changed markedly with inclusion criteria, such that the rank ordering of visual areas based on their TF preferences changed with the percentage of neurons included. It has been suggested that differences in TF tuning support a hierarchy of mouse visual areas. These results demonstrate that our understanding of the functional organization of the mouse visual cortex obtained from previous experiments critically depends on the inclusion criteria used.
神经生理学研究需要使用纳入标准来识别对实验刺激有反应的神经元。最近有五项研究使用钙成像来测量小鼠视觉区域中 2/3 层锥体神经元的首选调谐特性。这五项研究采用了不同的纳入标准，并报告了不同的、有时甚至相互矛盾的结果。在这里，我们研究了不同的纳入标准如何影响报告的调谐特性，通过修改纳入标准，从艾伦脑观测站的近 17000 个 2/3 层神经元的同一数据集中选择不同的亚群。纳入标准的选择极大地影响了由此产生的亚群的平均调谐特性；实际上，由于纳入标准而导致的平均调谐差异通常与研究之间的差异相当。特别是，由于纳入标准，视觉区域的平均首选时间频率（TF）发生了明显变化，使得基于 TF 偏好对视觉区域进行排序的顺序因纳入神经元的百分比而发生变化。有人认为，TF 调谐的差异支持了小鼠视觉区域的层次结构。这些结果表明，我们以前通过实验获得的对小鼠视觉皮层功能组织的理解，很大程度上取决于所使用的纳入标准。
