TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2012//
TI  - Visual orientation and directional selectivity through thalamic synchrony
JO  - Journal of neuroscience
A1  - Stanley, Garrett B.
A1  - Jin, Jianzhong
A1  - Wang, Yushi
A1  - Desbordes, Gaëlle
A1  - Wang, Qi
A1  - Black, Michael J.
A1  - Alonso, Jose-Manuel
SP  - 9073
EP  - 9088
VL  - 32
IS  - 26
N2  - Thalamic neurons respond to visual scenes by generating synchronous spike trains on the timescale of 10-20 ms that are very effective at driving cortical targets. Here we demonstrate that this synchronous activity contains unexpectedly rich information about fundamental properties of visual stimuli. We report that the occurrence of synchronous firing of cat thalamic cells with highly overlapping receptive fields is strongly sensitive to the orientation and the direction of motion of the visual stimulus. We show that this stimulus selectivity is robust, remaining relatively unchanged under different contrasts and temporal frequencies (stimulus velocities). A computational analysis based on an integrate-and-fire model of the direct thalamic input to a layer 4 cortical cell reveals a strong correlation between the degree of thalamic synchrony and the nonlinear relationship between cortical membrane potential and the resultant firing rate. Together, these findings suggest a novel population code in the synchronous firing of neurons in the early visual pathway that could serve as the substrate for establishing cortical representations of the visual scene.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 0270-6474
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4968-11.2012
ID  - ref1
ER  -