Integration of visual motion and locomotion in mouse visual cortex

• DOI: 10.1038/nn.3567
• Publication Date: 2013-11-03T21:13:44Z
• Authors: Aman B Saleem; Aslı Ayaz; Kathryn J Jeffery; Kenneth D Harris; Matteo Carandini
• Keywords: Male; Neurons; 0303 health sciences; Models, Neurological; Motion Perception; Action Potentials; Darkness; Environment; Article; Mice, Inbred C57BL; Mice; User-Computer Interface; 03 medical and health sciences; Orientation; Psychophysics; Animals; Nerve Net; Locomotion; Photic Stimulation; Visual Cortex

Successful navigation through the world requires accurate estimation of one's own speed. To derive this estimate, animals integrate visual speed gauged from optic flow and run speed gauged from proprioceptive and locomotor systems. The primary visual cortex (V1) carries signals related to visual speed, and its responses are also affected by run speed. To study how V1 combines these signals during navigation, we recorded from mice that traversed a virtual environment. Nearly half of the V1 neurons were reliably driven by combinations of visual speed and run speed. These neurons performed a weighted sum of the two speeds. The weights were diverse across neurons, and typically positive. As a population, V1 neurons predicted a linear combination of visual and run speeds better than either visual or run speeds alone. These data indicate that V1 in the mouse participates in a multimodal processing system that integrates visual motion and locomotion during navigation.