The flow of information from mouse primary visual cortex during visual perceptual discrimination

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The primary visual cortex plays a critical role in visual perception. This critical role is thought to be in part due to its position in the visual processing hierarchy. It is the first brain area in the neocortex to receive visual input, and it distributes this information to more than eighteen brain areas. Yet, little is known about which other brain areas are involved in visual perception, and further, which projections from the primary visual cortex are involved, which limits our understanding of the mechanisms by which the primary visual cortex contributes to visual perception. Here we propose to assess which cortical and subcortical areas are involved in visual perceptual discrimination. Further, we will assess whether the information flows to these brain areas via the direct projections from the primary visual cortex. In our previous work, we developed a visual discrimination task for mice. We showed that lesion of the primary visual cortex, or alternatively optogenetic silencing, causes the performance accuracy of mice to significantly drop. Importantly, mice still made choices and their motor functions were intact, suggesting that V1 had a solely perceptual role. The projections to cortical and subcortical brain areas are thought to have distinct roles: projections to cortical areas are thought to extract visual features from stimuli and aid in visual perception, while projections to subcortical areas are thought to modulate innate or simple behaviors. We hypothesize that cortical projections will play a critical role in mice performing a visual discrimination task because of their presumed roles in visual perception.