Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 2, 2026

Using Looming Visual Stimuli to Evaluate Mouse Vision
Published on: June 13, 2019
A Differential Circuit via Retino-Colliculo-Pulvinar Pathway Enhances Feature Selectivity in Visual Cortex through
Qi Fang1, Xiao-Lin Chou1, Bo Peng1
1Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA; Graduate Program in Neuroscience, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
Abstract:
In the mammalian visual system, information from the retina streams into parallel bottom-up pathways. It remains unclear how these pathways interact to contribute to contextual modulation of visual cortical processing. By optogenetic inactivation and activation of mouse lateral posterior nucleus (LP) of thalamus, a homolog of pulvinar, or its projection to primary visual cortex (V1), we found that LP contributes to surround suppression of layer (L) 2/3 responses in V1 by driving L1 inhibitory neurons. This results in subtractive suppression of visual responses and an overall enhancement of orientation, direction, spatial, and size selectivity. Neurons in V1-projecting LP regions receive bottom-up input from the superior colliculus (SC) and respond preferably to non-patterned visual noise. The noise-dependent LP activity allows V1 to "cancel" noise effects and maintain its orientation selectivity under varying noise background. Thus, the retina-SC-LP-V1 pathway forms a differential circuit with the canonical retino-geniculate pathway to achieve context-dependent sharpening of visual representations.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Vision
Visual System
Once through the pupil, the light passes through the lens, a...
Anatomy of the Eyeball
The Retina
Photoreceptors and Visual Pathways
Color Vision

