TY - JOUR TI - First spikes in visual cortex enable perceptual discrimination AU - Resulaj, Arbora AU - Ruediger, Sarah AU - Olsen, Shawn R AU - Scanziani, Massimo A2 - Slutsky, Inna VL - 7 PY - 2018 DA - 2018/04/16 SP - e34044 C1 - eLife 2018;7:e34044 DO - 10.7554/eLife.34044 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.34044 AB - Visually guided perceptual decisions involve the sequential activation of a hierarchy of cortical areas. It has been hypothesized that a brief time window of activity in each area is sufficient to enable the decision but direct measurements of this time window are lacking. To address this question, we develop a visual discrimination task in mice that depends on visual cortex and in which we precisely control the time window of visual cortical activity as the animal performs the task at different levels of difficulty. We show that threshold duration of activity in visual cortex enabling perceptual discrimination is between 40 and 80 milliseconds. During this time window the vast majority of neurons discriminating the stimulus fire one or no spikes and less than 16% fire more than two. This result establishes that the firing of the first visually evoked spikes in visual cortex is sufficient to enable a perceptual decision. KW - perceptual discrimination KW - primary visual cortex KW - electrophysiology KW - optogenetics JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -