Recruitment of inhibition and excitation across mouse visual cortex depends on the hierarchy of interconnecting areas
- Washington University School of Medicine, United States
- Allen Institute for Brain Science, United States
Abstract
Diverse features of sensory stimuli are selectively processed in distinct brain areas. The relative recruitment of inhibitory and excitatory neurons within an area controls the gain of neurons for appropriate stimulus coding. We examined how such a balance of inhibition and excitation is differentially recruited across multiple levels of a cortical hierarchy by mapping the locations and strengths of synaptic inputs to pyramidal and parvalbumin (PV)-expressing neurons in feedforward and feedback pathways interconnecting primary (V1) and two higher visual areas. While interareal excitation was stronger in PV than in pyramidal neurons in all layer 2/3 pathways, we observed a gradual scaling down of the inhibition/excitation ratio from the most feedforward to the most feedback pathway. Our results indicate that interareal gain control depends on the hierarchical position of the source and the target, the direction of information flow through the network, and the laminar location of target neurons.
Article and author information
Author details
Rinaldo David D'Souza
Andreas Burkhalter
Funding
National Eye Institute (R01 EY016184)
- Andreas Burkhalter
McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience
- Andreas Burkhalter
National Eye Institute (R01 EY022090)
- Andreas Burkhalter
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at Washington University (protocol numbers 20130104 and 20160093) and conformed to guidelines set by the National Institutes of Health.
Copyright
© 2016, D'Souza et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,612
- views
-
- 903
- downloads
-
- 85
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Recruitment of inhibition and excitation across mouse visual cortex depends on the hierarchy of interconnecting areas
eLife 5:e19332.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.19332
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
-
- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
