The sifting of visual information in the superior colliculus

Abstract
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Abstract

Much of the early visual system is devoted to sifting the visual scene for the few bits of behaviorally relevant information. In the visual cortex of mammals a hierarchical system of brain areas leads eventually to the selective encoding of important features, like faces and objects. Here we report that a similar process occurs in the other major visual pathway, the superior colliculus. We investigate the visual response properties of collicular neurons in the awake mouse with large-scale electrophysiology. Compared to the superficial collicular layers, neuronal responses in the deeper layers become more selective for behaviorally relevant stimuli; more invariant to location of stimuli in the visual field; and more suppressed by repeated occurrence of a stimulus in the same location. The memory of familiar stimuli persists in complete absence of the visual cortex. Models of these neural computations lead to specific predictions for neural circuitry in the superior colliculus.

Data availability

The data used in the manuscript as well as the analysis codes have been made available on CaltechDATA, under the accession number 1401 (doi:10.22002/D1.1401). We have provided the code for generating Figure 2 (fig2.m).

The following data sets were generated

1. Kyu Hyun Lee
2. Markus Meister
(2020) Data related to Lee et al 2020 eLife Sifting in SC
CaltechDATA, 1401.

https://doi.org/10.22002/D1.1401

Article and author information

Author details

Kyu Hyun Lee

Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Alvita Tran

Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Zeynep Turan

Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Markus Meister

Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, United States

For correspondence
meister@caltech.edu

Competing interests
Markus Meister, Reviewing editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-2136-6506

Funding

Simons Foundation (543015SPI)

Markus Meister

National Science Foundation (Graduate Research Fellowship)

Alvita Tran

National Institutes of Health (1R01NS111477)

Markus Meister

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: This study was performed according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#1656) of Caltech. All surgery was performed under isoflurane anesthesia and every effort was made to minimize suffering.

Copyright

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.