Preference for concentric orientations in the mouse superior colliculus

The superior colliculus is a layered structure important for body- and gaze-orienting responses. Its superficial layer is, next to the lateral geniculate nucleus, the second major target of retinal ganglion axons and is retinotopically organized. Here we show that in the mouse there is also a precis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2015-04, Vol.6 (1), p.6773-6773, Article 6773
Main Authors: Ahmadlou, Mehran, Heimel, J Alexander
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
14
14/35
631/378/2617/1832
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Animals
Electrodes, Implanted
Humanities and Social Sciences
Male
Mice
Mice, Inbred C57BL
multidisciplinary
Neurons - cytology
Neurons - physiology
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Photic Stimulation
Retina - physiology
Retinal Ganglion Cells - physiology
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Superior Colliculi - anatomy & histology
Superior Colliculi - physiology
Visual Cortex
Visual Pathways - anatomy & histology
Visual Pathways - physiology
Visual Perception
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Summary:The superior colliculus is a layered structure important for body- and gaze-orienting responses. Its superficial layer is, next to the lateral geniculate nucleus, the second major target of retinal ganglion axons and is retinotopically organized. Here we show that in the mouse there is also a precise organization of orientation preference. In columns perpendicular to the tectal surface, neurons respond to the same visual location and prefer gratings of the same orientation. Calcium imaging and extracellular recording revealed that the preferred grating varies with retinotopic location, and is oriented parallel to the concentric circle around the centre of vision through the receptive field. This implies that not all orientations are equally represented across the visual field. This makes the superior colliculus different from visual cortex and unsuitable for translation-invariant object recognition and suggests that visual stimuli might have different behavioural consequences depending on their retinotopic location. The mammalian superior colliculus (SC) processes visual stimuli but little is known about the spatial organization of the response preferences for specific visual features. Here the authors show that the mouse SC contains a map for orientation preference such that preferred grating orientation is aligned to concentric circles around the centre of the visual field.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/ncomms7773