Visual system articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neurons in the early visual system respond preferentially to the onset or offset of light. Here the authors show that ON/OFF responses cluster in the mouse primary visual cortex, shaping the receptive fields of cortical cells.

    • Elaine Tring
    • , Konnie K. Duan
    •  & Dario L. Ringach

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Najafian et al. introduce a developmental theory of map formation in the cerebral cortex. The theory proposes that increases in the density of thalamic afferents sampling sensory space make cortical maps to segregate more stimulus dimensions.

    • Sohrab Najafian
    • , Erin Koch
    •  & Jose-Manuel Alonso

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Limits of AAV-mediated gene therapy include targeting dominant mutations and inducing long-term transgene expression. Here, the authors show that AAV-HITI results in efficient allele-independent integration of a donor DNA in both retina and liver providing therapeutic benefit in mouse models of either a genetic form of blindness or a lysosomal storage disease, respectively.

    • Patrizia Tornabene
    • , Rita Ferla
    •  & Alberto Auricchio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors analyze the Allen Institute Brain Observatory Ca2+ imaging data, focusing on mouse visual cortex during locomotive and quiescent states. They find that locomotion increases neural coding fidelity, regardless of whether population activity increases or decreases in response to the population’s preferred stimuli.

    • Amelia J. Christensen
    •  & Jonathan W. Pillow

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The role of the prefrontal cortex in conscious perception is debated because of its involvement in task relevant behaviour, such as subjective perceptual reports. Here, the authors show that prefrontal activity in rhesus macaques correlates with subjective perception and the contents of consciousness can be decoded from prefrontal population activity even without reports.

    • Vishal Kapoor
    • , Abhilash Dwarakanath
    •  & Nikos K. Logothetis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Primary cilia are key sensory organelles whose dysfunction leads to ciliopathy disorders such as Bardet-Biedl syndrome (BBS). Here they identify a role for Bbs1 in lipid homeostasis of photoreceptor outer segments in zebrafish, which may contribute to vision loss in patients with Bardet-Biedl syndrome.

    • Markus Masek
    • , Christelle Etard
    •  & Ruxandra Bachmann-Gagescu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pre-existing antibodies against Cas9 proteins represent a potential issue for gene therapies, including those targeting the eye. Here the authors assess the presence of intraocular antibodies, and show that Cas9 antibodies were prevalent in human serum but not the eye, unless prior bacterial infection occurred.

    • Marcus A. Toral
    • , Carsten T. Charlesworth
    •  & Vinit B. Mahajan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Vision in mosquitoes plays a critical but understudied role in their attraction to hosts. Here, the authors show that encounter with an attractive odor gates the mosquito attraction to specific colors, especially the long wavelengths reflected from human skin. Filtering the long wavelengths reflected from the human skin or knocking-out the ability for the mosquito to detect the wavelengths, suppressed their attraction. This work transforms our understanding of mosquito vision from the conventional view that vision does little in mediating mosquito-host interactions, to the recognition that vision plays a critical role.

    • Diego Alonso San Alberto
    • , Claire Rusch
    •  & Jeffrey A. Riffell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hue (e.g. red, blue) and luminance polarity (light/dark) are basic visual features. This paper shows that the brain has both joint and separable representations of these features, and extracts hue approximately 20 milliseconds later, with a more sustained representation.

    • Katherine L. Hermann
    • , Shridhar R. Singh
    •  & Bevil R. Conway

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mouse visual cortex is a dense, interconnected network of distinct areas. D’Souza et al. identify an anatomical index to quantify the hierarchical nature of pathways, and highlight the hierarchical and nonhierarchical features of the network.

    • Rinaldo D. D’Souza
    • , Quanxin Wang
    •  & Andreas Burkhalter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unknown whether object category learning can be formed purely through domain general learning of natural image structure. Here the authors show that human visual brain responses to objects are well-captured by self-supervised deep neural network models trained without labels, supporting a domain-general account.

    • Talia Konkle
    •  & George A. Alvarez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of blindness and is characterised by the accumulation of lipid deposits, called drusen. Here, the authors show that mice lacking chloride intracellular channel 4 in retinal pigment epithelium have defective lipid processing in the eye and pathological features mirroring human AMD, including drusen formation.

    • Jen-Zen Chuang
    • , Nan Yang
    •  & Ching-Hwa Sung

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Super-enhancers are regions of genomic DNA comprised of multiple putative enhancers that contribute to dynamic gene expression patterns during development. Here the authors identify a modular super-enhancer in murine retinal development and show that distinct modules are responsible for retinal progenitor cell proliferation during early and bipolar neuron genesis during late retinal development.

    • Victoria Honnell
    • , Jackie L. Norrie
    •  & Michael A. Dyer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Face-selective neurons are observed in the primate visual pathway and are considered as the basis of face detection in the brain. Here, using a hierarchical deep neural network model of the ventral visual stream, the authors suggest that face selectivity arises in the complete absence of training.

    • Seungdae Baek
    • , Min Song
    •  & Se-Bum Paik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual recognition depends on the ability to extract specific shape and colour features from complicated natural scenes. Here, the authors show that neurons along the object-recognition cortical pathway encode information-concentrating features of moderate complexity and of behavioural relevance.

    • Olivia Rose
    • , James Johnson
    •  & Carlos R. Ponce

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A late enhancement of the perisaccadic neural response may exist in extrastriate areas. Here the authors show this preserves pre-saccadic information until the post-saccadic information is received, maintaining an integrated representation of the visual scene across saccadic eye movements.

    • Amir Akbarian
    • , Kelsey Clark
    •  & Neda Nategh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Priors learnt from lifetime experiences influence perception. The authors show that when perception is congruent with a long-term prior, there is increased top-down input in the ventral visual stream, whereas bottom-up input is enhanced when perception is incongruent with prior.

    • Richard Hardstone
    • , Michael Zhu
    •  & Biyu J. He

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In humans, stroke damage to V1 causes large visual field defects. Spared V1 activity prior to training predicts the amount of training-induced recovery in luminance detection sensitivity. Moreover, visual training changes population receptive field properties within residual V1 circuits.

    • Antoine Barbot
    • , Anasuya Das
    •  & Krystel R. Huxlin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Spontaneous traveling cortical waves shape neural responses. Using a large-scale computational model, the authors show that transmission delays shape locally asynchronous spiking dynamics into traveling waves without inducing correlations and boost responses to external input, as observed in vivo.

    • Zachary W. Davis
    • , Gabriel B. Benigno
    •  & Lyle Muller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many behaviours depend on predictions about the environment. Here the authors find neural populations in primary visual cortex to straighten the temporal trajectories of natural video clips, facilitating the extrapolation of past observations.

    • Olivier J. Hénaff
    • , Yoon Bai
    •  & Robbe L. T. Goris

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rapid and spontaneous estimation of number is observed in many animals. Here the authors show that perceived number of items modulates the pupillary light response in humans, confirming its spontaneous nature, and introducing pupillometry as a tool to study numerical cognition.

    • Elisa Castaldi
    • , Antonella Pomè
    •  & Paola Binda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A comprehensive analysis of the ocular networks among various tissues is necessary to understand eye physiology in health and disease. Here the authors present a multi-species single-cell transcriptomic atlas consisting of cells of the cornea, iris, ciliary body, neural retina, retinal pigmented epithelium, and choroid.

    • Pradeep Gautam
    • , Kiyofumi Hamashima
    •  & Yuin-Han Loh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Distinct brain regions are claimed to respond selectively to faces, places and bodies, but what counts as a face, place or body is less well defined. Here we build computational models that accurately predict the response of these regions to novel images, enabling stronger tests and confirmation of their selectivity.

    • N. Apurva Ratan Murty
    • , Pouya Bashivan
    •  & Nancy Kanwisher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The signal-to-noise ratio is a key consideration when selecting a magnetic resonance imaging protocol. Thermal noise is major issue, especially in high resolution functional images. Here the authors introduce a method to suppress thermal noise in functional images without losses in spatial precision, increasing the signal-to-noise ratio.

    • Luca Vizioli
    • , Steen Moeller
    •  & Kamil Uğurbil

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Drosophila visual system first computes motion in the dendrites of T4 and T5 neurons via a linear mechanism that uses ON and OFF information. Here, the authors show that the Tm9, Tm2, and CT1 neurons provide both ON and OFF information to direction-selective T5 cells in the OFF pathway.

    • Giordano Ramos-Traslosheros
    •  & Marion Silies

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In the cerebral cortex, information is processed by multiple hierarchically organized areas, reciprocally connected via feedforward and feedback circuits. Here the authors show that in primate visual cortex, feedforward projection neurons receive monosynaptic feedback contacts selectively from the area to which they project.

    • Caitlin Siu
    • , Justin Balsor
    •  & Alessandra Angelucci

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The relative roles of visual, parietal, and frontal cortex in working memory have been actively debated. Here, the authors show that distraction impacts visual working memory representations in primary visual areas, indicating that these regions play a key role in the maintenance of working memory.

    • Grace E. Hallenbeck
    • , Thomas C. Sprague
    •  & Clayton E. Curtis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual processing necessitates both extracting and discarding information. Here, the authors use a specialized set of stimuli and two complementary discrimination tasks to demonstrate the opposing perceptual implications of these two aspects of information processing.

    • Corey M. Ziemba
    •  & Eero P. Simoncelli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Feedback modulates visual neurons, thought to help achieve flexible task performance. Here, the authors show decision-related feedback is not only relayed to task-relevant neurons, suggesting a broader mechanism and supporting a previously hypothesized link to feature-based attention.

    • Katrina R. Quinn
    • , Lenka Seillier
    •  & Hendrikje Nienborg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The representation of space in mouse visual cortex was considered to be relatively uniform. The authors show that mice have improved visual resolution in a cortical region representing a location in space directly in front and slightly above them, showing that the representation of space in mouse visual cortex is non-uniform.

    • Enny H. van Beest
    • , Sreedeep Mukherjee
    •  & Matthew W. Self

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The gene regulatory network controlling the bifurcation of common progenitors into the neural retina and retinal-pigmented epithelium programs remains poorly understood. Here the authors study transcriptome dynamics and chromatin accessibility during this process in zebrafish, revealing network redundancy, as well as context-dependent and sequential transcription factor activity.

    • Lorena Buono
    • , Jorge Corbacho
    •  & Juan-Ramón Martínez-Morales

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural sampling theory suggests that neuronal variability encodes the uncertainty of probabilistic inferences. This paper shows that response variability in primary visual cortex reflects the statistical structure of visual inputs, as required for inferences correctly tuned to the statistics of the natural environment.

    • Dylan Festa
    • , Amir Aschner
    •  & Ruben Coen-Cagli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors show that the brain represents small and large numerosity ranges in a continuous topographic map, in line with the idea that differences in map properties underlie differences in perception.

    • Yuxuan Cai
    • , Shir Hofstetter
    •  & Serge O. Dumoulin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cortical and subcortical neural activity supporting conscious object recognition has not yet been well defined. Here, the authors describe these networks and show recognition-related category information can be decoded from widespread cortical activity but not subcortical activity.

    • Max Levinson
    • , Ella Podvalny
    •  & Biyu J. He

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