I’m very excited to share our latest preprint: ‘Experience-dependent predictions of feedforward and contextual information in mouse visual cortex’

RT @NIN_knaw: 🎉 Huge congratulations to Doris Dijksterhuis (@DorisDijk) for winning the 2024 Brain Award for Scientific Excellence, and to…

RT @DorisDijk: Proud of our work and my PhD baby. Now out in Science: Pronouns reactivate conceptual representations in human hippocampal n…

RT @BeckyJordan321: We are looking for postdocs funded by an ERC starting grant to investigate the mechanisms of cortical predictive learni…

@guido_meijer @ah_leighton Van harte gefeliciteerd allebei!!!

@ShoheiFurutachi Congrats, fantastic work!

RT @DorisDijk: Our preprint is out! During my PhD at the @NIN_knaw, we studied the role of concept cells (found in the human hippocampus) i…

@NeuroScholl @CN_Levelt @paolo_papale @JMontijn @mattlark @Pieters_Tweet @LarsMuckli Hi Benjamin, yes they do!

@jcbyts decode occl stims which would be inconsistent with scanning random parts of the non-occl image, and 4) scanning eye movements would result in inconsistent onset latencies for the occl responses. Instead they are slightly delayed but consistent.

What about responses to novel images that were left out of the training? They increased for both non-occluded and occluded stimuli, suggesting that prediction errors computed in higher brain regions enhance stimulus-specific responses in V1.

Furthermore, decoding patterns were highly similar between mouse, monkey and human, despite using different neural recording techniques! This suggests that similar neural mechanisms underlie these responses across species.

Is there stimulus-specific information in responses to occluded stimuli? Yes! We performed linear discriminant analysis to train and test a classifier on responses to non-occluded (NO) and occluded (O) stimuli and found significant decoding across nearly all conditions.

Interestingly, many L2/3 neurons responded to either the non-occluded stimuli or the occluded stimuli, especially in expert mice and during task engagement. This separation into two populations was less pronounced in L5.

Although L2/3 and L5 neurons in naive mice responded to non-occluded and occluded familiar stimuli, visual experience had huge consequences: responses to non-occluded stimuli decreased while responses to occluded stimuli increased.

In addition to the Naive and Expert conditions, where mice passively viewed the stimuli, we also recorded during Task engagement. We made sure to only include neurons whose cRF was on the occluded area.

Here, we asked whether similar signals exist in single neurons of mouse V1 and how they depend on prior visual experience. We recorded L2/3 and L5 neurons in V1 using 2P Ca imaging before and after familiarizing the mice with a subset of natural images.

These responses to occluded visual scenes contain stimulus-specific information and may represent predictions related to the missing content...

Earlier work in humans and monkeys used partially occluded natural images to eliminate feedforward inputs, showing that V1 responds to occluded stimuli