Visual system articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    In complex networks of the cerebral cortex, the majority of connections are weak and only a minority strong, but it is not known why; here the authors show that excitatory neurons in primary visual cortex follow a rule by which strong connections are sparse and occur between neurons with correlated responses to visual stimuli, whereas only weak connections link neurons with uncorrelated responses.

    • Lee Cossell
    • , Maria Florencia Iacaruso
    •  & Thomas D. Mrsic-Flogel

  • Letter |

    Population recordings reveal that neurons in the mouse superior colliculus are grouped according to their preferred orientations or movement axes for visual line stimuli, similar to the columnar arrangement in visual cortex of higher mammals; this functional architecture suggests that the superior colliculus samples the visual world unevenly for stimulus orientations.

    • Evan H. Feinberg
    •  & Markus Meister

  • Article |

    This study tracks dragonfly head and body movements during high-velocity and high-precision prey-capture flights, and shows that the dragonfly uses predictive internal models and reactive control to build an interception trajectory that complies with biomechanical constraints.

    • Matteo Mischiati
    • , Huai-Ti Lin
    •  & Anthony Leonardo

  • Article |

    Motion detection by the retina is thought to rely largely on the biophysics of starburst amacrine cell dendrites; here machine learning is used with gamified crowdsourcing to draw the wiring diagram involving amacrine and bipolar cells to identify a plausible circuit mechanism for direction selectivity; the model suggests similarities between mammalian and insect vision.

    • Jinseop S. Kim
    • , Matthew J. Greene
    •  & H. Sebastian Seung

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Bassam V. Atallah
    • , Massimo Scanziani
    •  & Matteo Carandini

  • Letter |

    Intracellular recordings distinguish between mechanisms that can account for variability in primary visual cortex of alert primates, consistent with a scheme in which spiking is driven by infrequent synchronous events during fixation, with sensory stimulation shifting the cortex to an asynchronous state.

    • Andrew Y. Y. Tan
    • , Yuzhi Chen
    •  & Nicholas J. Priebe

  • Letter |

    Saccadic eye movements cause substantial shifts in the retinal image as we take in visual scenes, but our perception is stable and continuous; here, visual receptive fields are shown to shift dramatically towards the saccadic goal, running counter to the long-standing hypothesis of receptive field remapping as the basis of perceived stability.

    • Marc Zirnsak
    • , Nicholas A. Steinmetz
    •  & Tirin Moore

  • Letter |

    Neuronal dendrites are not passive cables, but whether their excitability contributes to computation at the cell’s soma has been uncertain; by observing and interfering with dendritic ‘spikes’ during sensory stimulation, it is now shown that active dendritic processing enhances somatic orientation selectivity, a fundamental brain computation.

    • Spencer L. Smith
    • , Ikuko T. Smith
    •  & Michael Häusser

  • Letter |

    Two-photon calcium imaging experiments reveal that ring neurons in the Drosophila central complex represent visual features and show direction-selective orientation tuning, resembling simple cells in mammalian primary visual cortex; future fly studies may enhance our understanding of circuit computations underlying visually guided action selection.

    • Johannes D. Seelig
    •  & Vivek Jayaraman

  • Letter |

    This study uses calcium imaging to show that T4 and T5 neurons are divided in specific subpopulations responding to motion in four cardinal directions, and are specific to ON versus OFF edges, respectively; when either T4 or T5 neurons were genetically blocked, tethered flies walking on air-suspended beads failed to respond to the corresponding visual stimuli.

    • Matthew S. Maisak
    • , Juergen Haag
    •  & Alexander Borst

  • Article |

    Reconstruction of a connectome within the fruitfly visual medulla, containing more than 300 neurons and over 8,000 chemical synapses, reveals a candidate motion detection circuit; such a circuit operates by combining displaced visual inputs, an operation consistent with correlation based motion detection.

    • Shin-ya Takemura
    • , Arjun Bharioke
    •  & Dmitri B. Chklovskii

  • Article |

    Improved electron microscopy methods are used to map a mammalian retinal circuit of close to 1,000 neurons; the work reveals a new type of retinal bipolar neuron and suggests functional mechanisms for known visual computations.

    • Moritz Helmstaedter
    • , Kevin L. Briggman
    •  & Winfried Denk

  • Article |

    In freely moving rodents, eye movements serve to keep the visual fields of the two eyes continuously overlapping overhead at the expense of continuous alignment, a strategy that may have evolved to maintain constant overhead surveillance of predators.

    • Damian J. Wallace
    • , David S. Greenberg
    •  & Jason N. D. Kerr

  • Letter |

    A study of mouse visual cortex relating patterns of excitatory synaptic connectivity to visual response properties of neighbouring neurons shows that, after eye opening, local connectivity reorganizes extensively: more connections form selectively between neurons with similar visual responses and connections are eliminated between visually unresponsive neurons, but the overall connectivity rate does not change.

    • Ho Ko
    • , Lee Cossell
    •  & Thomas D. Mrsic-Flogel

  • Letter |

    Visual responses during wakefulness are dominated by inhibition, and this inhibition shapes visual selectivity by restricting the temporal and spatial extent of neural activity.

    • Bilal Haider
    • , Michael Häusser
    •  & Matteo Carandini

  • Letter |

    Examination of spatial representations in the entorhinal cortex of monkeys performing a visual memory task reveals individual neurons that emit action potentials when the monkey fixates multiple discrete locations in the visual field, and suggests that entorhinal cortex neurons encode space during visual exploration, even without locomotion.

    • Nathaniel J. Killian
    • , Michael J. Jutras
    •  & Elizabeth A. Buffalo

  • Article |

    The activity of somatostatin-expressing inhibitory neurons (SOMs) in the superficial layers of the mouse visual cortex increases with stimulation of the receptive-field surround, thereby contributing to the surround suppression of pyramidal cells.

    • Hillel Adesnik
    • , William Bruns
    •  & Massimo Scanziani

  • Article |

    In live neonatal mice, waves of spontaneous retinal activity are present and can propagate patterned information capable of guiding activity-dependent development of complex intra- and inter-hemispheric circuits throughout the visual system before the onset of vision (before eye opening).

    • James B. Ackman
    • , Timothy J. Burbridge
    •  & Michael C. Crair

  • News & Views |

    Our brains focus on important events and filter out distracting ones. An investigation in monkeys reveals a surprising dissociation between the neuronal and behavioural manifestations of attention. See Letter p.434

    • Alexandra Smolyanskaya
    •  & Richard T. Born

  • News Feature |

    With his knack for knowing what stem cells want, Yoshiki Sasai has grown an eye and parts of a brain in a dish.

    • David Cyranoski

  • News & Views |

    Producing a single image from two eyes requires complex brain circuitry. A comparison of neural responses in babies shows that early visual stimulation following premature birth leads to accelerated development of the visual system.

    • Eileen Birch

  • Letter |

    It has been proposed that, during development, clonally related neurons migrate along the same radial glial fibre to form clusters of functionally similar cells; here, sister neurons in the same radial clone are shown to have similar orientation preferences in mice, providing support for this hypothesis.

    • Ye Li
    • , Hui Lu
    •  & Yang Dan

  • News & Views |

    Evidence that a larval brachiopod has ciliary photoreceptors that are directionally selective, and therefore may function as eyes, bears on an enduring puzzle about photoreceptor evolution in animals.

    • Daniel Osorio

  • Article |

    Organogenesis relies on the orchestration of many cellular interactions to create the collective cell behaviours that progressively shape developing tissues. Using a three-dimensional embryonic stem cell culture system, this study successfully generated neural retinal tissues that formed a fully stratified neural retinal structure with all the major components located in their proper spatial location as seen during optic-cup development in vivo. This approach might have important implications for stem cell therapy for retinal repair.

    • Mototsugu Eiraku
    • , Nozomu Takata
    •  & Yoshiki Sasai

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Wolfgang Wiltschko
    • , Joachim Traudt
    •  & Roswitha Wiltschko

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