NMDA receptors in visual cortex are necessary for normal visuomotor integration and skill learning

Abstract
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Abstract

The experience of coupling between motor output and visual feedback is necessary for the development of visuomotor skills and shapes visuomotor integration in visual cortex. Whether these experience dependent changes of responses in V1 depend on modifications of the local circuit or are the consequence of circuit changes outside of V1 remains unclear. Here, we probed the role of NMDA receptor dependent signaling, which is known to be involved in neuronal plasticity, in mouse primary visual cortex (V1) during visuomotor development. We used a local knockout of NMDA receptors and a photoactivatable inhibition of CaMKII in V1 during first visual experience to probe for changes in neuronal activity in V1 as well as the influence on performance in a visuomotor task. We found that a knockout of NMDA receptors before, but not after, first visuomotor experience reduced responses to unpredictable stimuli, diminished the suppression of predictable feedback in V1, and impaired visuomotor skill learning later in life. Our results demonstrate that NMDA receptor dependent signaling in V1 is critical during first visuomotor experience for shaping visuomotor integration and enabling visuomotor skill learning.

Data availability

Software for controlling the two-photon microscope and preprocessing of the calcium imaging data is available on https://sourceforge.net/projects/iris-scanning/. Raw data and code to generate all figures of this manuscript are available on https://data.fmi.ch/PublicationSupplementRepo/.

Article and author information

Author details

Felix C Widmer

Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel, Switzerland

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Sean M O'Toole

Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel, Switzerland

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Georg B Keller

Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel, Switzerland

For correspondence
georg.keller@fmi.ch

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1401-0117

Funding

Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

Georg B Keller

H2020 European Research Council (865617)

Georg B Keller

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 animal procedures were approved by and carried out in accordance with guidelines of the Veterinary Department of the Canton Basel-Stadt, Switzerland under license number 2573.

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.