A Disinhibitory Circuit for Contextual Modulation in Primary Visual Cortex

Context guides perception by influencing the saliency of sensory stimuli. Accordingly, in visual cortex, responses to a stimulus are modulated by context, the visual scene surrounding the stimulus. Responses are suppressed when stimulus and surround are similar but not when they differ. The mechanisms that remove suppression when stimulus and surround differ remain unclear. Here we use optical recordings, manipulations, and computational modelling to show that a disinhibitory circuit consisting of vasoactive-intestinal-peptide-expressing (VIP) and somatostatin-expressing (SOM) inhibitory neurons modulates responses in mouse visual cortex depending on the similarity between stimulus and surround. When the stimulus and the surround are similar, VIP neurons are inactive and SOM neurons suppress excitatory neurons. However, when the stimulus and the surround differ, VIP neurons are active, thereby inhibiting SOM neurons and relieving excitatory neurons from suppression. We have identified a canonical cortical disinhibitory circuit which contributes to contextual modulation and may regulate perceptual saliency.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2020-01-31

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/2020.01.31.929166PMID 33301712PMCID PMC7850578
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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