The developmental emergence of reliable cortical representations

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

Background:

• Cortical networks develop fundamental structures early, preceding sensory input.
• The transition from endogenous network activity to experience-driven sensory representation is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the 'nature-nurture transform' in the developing visual cortex.
• To understand how cortical networks adapt to sensory experience at a single-trial level.

Main Methods:

• Chronic in vivo calcium imaging in ferret visual cortex.
• Analysis of network activity patterns before and after eye opening.
• Computational modeling to elucidate representation formation.

Main Results:

• Post eye opening, visual stimulation elicits variable, modular network activity, hindering stimulus discrimination.
• Initial stimulus-evoked patterns differ from pre-eye opening spontaneous activity.
• One week of visual experience leads to reliable, low-dimensional stimulus representations and reorganized spontaneous activity.

Conclusions:

• Visual experience rapidly reshapes cortical network activity and representation.
• Reliable visual representations emerge from the alignment of feedforward and recurrent networks, guided by visual input.