McClure, John Patrick. Sound-induced contextual modulation of the representation of oriented visual stimuli in the primary visual cortex of awake behaving mice. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-zfh2-m240
DescriptionThe cerebral cortex is continuously receiving sensory information provided by the five senses. The role of sensory processing is to identify and integrate the sensory information necessary for the selection and execution of behaviors most adapted to the environmental conditions. Most of the time, combining or comparing the signals provided by different sensory modalities leads to optimal processing of the information. The mechanisms responsible for the interactions between at least two different sensory modalities are critical for the production of a relevant behavioral response. However, the cellular and network activities underpinning multimodal integration are poorly understood. For decades, scientist thought that multisensory interactions occur only in ‘higher-order’ cortical regions. Only recently, converging evidence has shown that part of cross-modal cortical integration occurs as early as the primary sensory cortices, such as the existence of direct cortico-cortical projections between the primary auditory cortex (A1) and the primary visual cortex (V1). Despite these findings, the effects of sounds on visually-evoked responses along with the influence of the audiovisual context on visual processing and visual perception remain unclear. Therefore, two-photon calcium imaging was performed in V1 of awake mice passively or actively processing oriented visual stimuli in order to determine the effect of sounds on visual processing. The results demonstrated an association between auditory stimulation and improvements on V1 representation of the orientation and the direction of the visual stimulus. This improvement of the representation of the visual stimulus was associated with a decrease in the limits of angular perception of mice performing an angular perception task. Finally, the results indicated that during active audiovisual processing, the modulation of the representation of the visual stimuli in V1 dynamically adapted to the needs of the behavioral task. Altogether, the results showed that other sensory modalities influence visual processing in V1 and visual perception, and are adaptable to the behavioral goal.