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

初级视觉皮质在视觉感知中起着至关重要的作用。这一关键角色被认为部分是由于它在视觉处理层次结构中的位置。它是新大脑皮层中第一个接受视觉输入的大脑区域，它将这些信息分配给18个以上的大脑区域。然而，关于大脑其他区域参与视觉知觉，以及初级视觉皮质参与了哪些投射，我们知之甚少，这限制了我们对初级视觉皮质促进视觉知觉的机制的理解。在这里，我们建议评估哪些皮质和皮质下区域涉及视觉知觉辨别。此外，我们将评估信息是否通过初级视觉皮质的直接投射流向这些脑区。在我们之前的工作中，我们开发了一项针对小鼠的视觉辨别任务。我们发现，初级视觉皮质的损伤，或者是光遗传沉默，会导致小鼠的操作准确性显著下降。重要的是，老鼠仍然做出了选择，它们的运动功能完好无损，这表明V1只起到了知觉作用。大脑皮质和皮质下区域的投影被认为有不同的作用：皮质区域的投影被认为是从刺激中提取视觉特征并帮助视觉感知，而皮质下区域的投影被认为是调节先天或简单的行为。我们假设皮层投射将在执行视觉辨别任务的小鼠中发挥关键作用，因为它们在视觉感知中的假定作用。

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.