Visual system articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Population receptive fields (pRFs) in the visual system are key information-processors, but how they develop is unknown. Here, authors use fMRI and pRF modeling in children and adults to show that in the ventral stream only pRFs in face- and word-selective regions continue to develop, mirroring changes in viewing behavior.

    • Jesse Gomez
    • , Vaidehi Natu
    •  & Kalanit Grill-Spector

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neocortical circuits exhibit diverse cell types that can be difficult to build into computational models. Here the authors employ a genetic algorithm-based parameter optimization to generate multi-compartment Hodgkin-Huxley models for diverse cell types in the Allen Cell Types Database.

    • Nathan W. Gouwens
    • , Jim Berg
    •  & Anton Arkhipov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Blurred edges of objects can aid in depth perception and segmentation, yet how it is combined with shape information in the visual pathway is unknown. Here the authors report that neurons in higher visual area V4 represent both object shape and boundary blur, controlling for stimulus size, intensity and curvature.

    • Timothy D. Oleskiw
    • , Amy Nowack
    •  & Anitha Pasupathy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The function of receptor desensitization in vivo is not well understood. Here, the authors show that deletion of CKAMP44, an AMPAR auxiliary protein that modulates desensitization of AMPAR currents, affects synaptic facilitation at retinogeniculate synapses and visually-evoked firing in awake mice.

    • Xufeng Chen
    • , Muhammad Aslam
    •  & Jakob von Engelhardt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neurons in the inferotemporal cortex (IT) encode object identity; however, how object color is represented here is not well understood. Here the authors report that neurons from three color patches in macaque IT encode significant information regarding the hue and shape of objects in a hierarchical manner.

    • Le Chang
    • , Pinglei Bao
    •  & Doris Y. Tsao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual input received by photoreceptors is relayed to retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which have selectivity for inputs of certain orientations. Here, the authors show that gap junction-mediated input onto one type of RGC contributes to its orientation selectivity.

    • Amurta Nath
    •  & Gregory W. Schwartz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Retinal ganglion cell subtypes are traditionally thought to encode a single visual feature across the visual field to form a feature map. Here the authors show that fast OFF ganglion cells in fact respond to two visual features, either object position or speed, depending on the stimulus location.

    • Stéphane Deny
    • , Ulisse Ferrari
    •  & Olivier Marre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    To restore sight after retinal degeneration, one approach is to express light-sensitive proteins in remaining cells. Here the authors combine a light-sensitive engineered G protein-coupled receptor and ion channels to restore ON and OFF responses as well as superior visual pattern discrimination.

    • Michael H. Berry
    • , Amy Holt
    •  & Ehud Y. Isacoff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Large electronics limit low-noise, non-invasive electrophysiological measurements to a thousand simultaneously recording channels. Here the authors build an array of 65k simultaneously recording and stimulating electrodes and use it to sort and classify single neurons across the entire mouse retina.

    • David Tsai
    • , Daniel Sawyer
    •  & Kenneth L. Shepard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rod photoreceptors are thought to be saturated under bright light. Here, the authors describe the physiological parameters that mediate response saturation of rod photoreceptors in mouse retina, and show that rods can drive visual responses in photopic conditions.

    • Alexandra Tikidji-Hamburyan
    • , Katja Reinhard
    •  & Thomas A. Münch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Changes in synchrony of cortical populations are observed across the sleep-wake cycle, however the effect of fluctuations in synchrony during wakefulness is not understood. Here the authors show that visual cortical neurons have improved sensory encoding accuracy as well as improved perceptual performance during periods of local population desynchrony.

    • Charles B. Beaman
    • , Sarah L. Eagleman
    •  & Valentin Dragoi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though people are easily able to recall items in a category without mentioning a wrong exemplar, the mechanism underlying this ability is unknown. Here, authors use intracranial recordings to show that this ability is likely due to a selective increase in baseline neuronal activity in category-specific regions.

    • Yitzhak Norman
    • , Erin M. Yeagle
    •  & Rafael Malach

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Retinal rod bipolar cells (RBCs) partially undergo programmed cell death triggering cell density-dependent plasticity. This study shows that increased removal of RBCs using genetic approaches causes dendrites of the remaining RBCs to expand and contact more rod photoreceptors while reducing connectivity with each.

    • Robert E. Johnson
    • , Nai-Wen Tien
    •  & Daniel Kerschensteiner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Macaque higher visual areas MST and VIP encode heading direction based on self-motion stimuli. Here the authors show that, while making saccades, the heading direction decoded from the neural responses is compressed toward straight-ahead, and independently demonstrate a perceptual illusion in humans based on this perisaccadic decoding error.

    • Frank Bremmer
    • , Jan Churan
    •  & Markus Lappe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The searchlight hypothesis proposes that the thalamic reticular nucleus regulates thalamic relay activity through focal attentional modulation. Here the authors show that the receptive field sizes of reticular neurons are small enough to provide localized feedback onto thalamic neurons in the visual pathway.

    • Cristina Soto-Sánchez
    • , Xin Wang
    •  & Judith A. Hirsch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The local immune responses in the eye are attenuated to preserve sight. Surprisingly, Deliyanti et al. show that regulatory T cells (Tregs) take an active role in protecting the eye from neovascularization in oxygen-induced retinopathy, and that interventions that augment the retinal Treg numbers reduce neovascular retinopathy in mice.

    • Devy Deliyanti
    • , Dean M. Talia
    •  & Jennifer L. Wilkinson-Berka

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Choice-related signals in neuronal activity may reflect bottom-up sensory processes, top-down decision-related influences, or a combination of the two. Here the authors report that choice-related activity in VIP neurons is not predictable from their stimulus tuning, and that dominant choice signals can bias the standard metric of choice preference (choice probability).

    • Adam Zaidel
    • , Gregory C. DeAngelis
    •  & Dora E. Angelaki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Focal cortical seizures result from local and widespread propagation of excitatory activity. Here the authors employ widefield calcium imaging in mouse visual areas to demonstrate that these seizures start as local synchronous activation and then propagate along the connectivity that underlies normal sensory processing.

    • L. Federico Rossi
    • , Robert C. Wykes
    •  & Matteo Carandini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How a neuron integrates sensory information requires knowledge about its functional presynaptic connections. Here the authors report a new method using non-negative matrix factorization to identify the layout of presynaptic bipolar cell inputs onto retinal ganglion cells and predict their responses to natural stimuli.

    • Jian K. Liu
    • , Helene M. Schreyer
    •  & Tim Gollisch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mechanisms of neural processing can only be understood by revealing patterns of connectivity among the cellular components of the circuit. Here the authors report a new genetic toolbox, ‘Optobow’, which enables simultaneous optogenetic activation of single neurons in zebrafish and measuring the activity of downstream neurons in the network.

    • Dominique Förster
    • , Marco Dal Maschio
    •  & Herwig Baier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    V2 neurons exhibit complex and diverse selectivity for visual features. Here the authors use a statistical analytical framework to model V2 responses to natural stimuli and find three organizing principles, chief among them is the cross-orientation suppression that increases response selectivity.

    • Ryan J. Rowekamp
    •  & Tatyana O. Sharpee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Single-cell characterization and perturbation of neurons is critical for revealing the structure-function relationship of brain cells. Here the authors develop a robot that performs single-cell electroporation and extracellular electrophysiology and can be used for performingin vivosingle-cell experiments in deep brain tissues optically difficult to access.

    • Lu Li
    • , Benjamin Ouellette
    •  & Hongkui Zeng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Machine learning algorithms can decode objects that people see or imagine from their brain activity. Here the authors present a predictive decoder combined with deep neural network representations that generalizes beyond the training set and correctly identifies novel objects that it has never been trained on.

    • Tomoyasu Horikawa
    •  & Yukiyasu Kamitani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Frontal eye field (FEF) is a visual prefrontal area involved in top-down attention. Here the authors report that FEF neurons projecting to V4/MT are persistently active during spatial working memory, and V4/MT neurons show changes in receptive field and gain at the location held in working memory.

    • Yaser Merrikhi
    • , Kelsey Clark
    •  & Behrad Noudoost

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hypothalamus is important for regulating feeding behaviour. Here the authors report genetic identification of neurons in the pretecto-hypothalamic circuit, and their causal involvement in prey detection and prey capture, using a combination of functional imaging and ablation studies in freely swimming zebrafish larvae.

    • Akira Muto
    • , Pradeep Lal
    •  & Koichi Kawakami

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Adult visual cortex is organized into regions that respond to categories such as faces and scenes, but it is unclear if this depends on experience. Here, authors measured brain activity in 4–6 month old infants looking at faces and scenes and find that their visual cortex is organized similarly to adults.

    • Ben Deen
    • , Hilary Richardson
    •  & Rebecca Saxe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Stimulus orientation in the primary visual cortex of primates and carnivores is mapped into a geometrical mosaic but the functional implications of these maps remain debated. Here the authors reveal an association between the structure of cortical orientation maps in cats, and the functions of local cortical circuits in processing patterns and contours.

    • Erin Koch
    • , Jianzhong Jin
    •  & Qasim Zaidi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perceiving objects as lifelike is an inferential process but whether it occurs quickly and how it applies to groups of objects is not well understood. Here the authors show that observers’ percepts of crowd lifelikeness are fast and represent the average of the individual objects comprising that crowd.

    • Allison Yamanashi Leib
    • , Anna Kosovicheva
    •  & David Whitney

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Integration of transplanted photoreceptors into the host retina has been assumed as the underlying mechanism for vision improvement in pre-clinical studies. Here, the authors show that the majority of transplanted photoreceptors do not structurally integrate but exchange intercellular material with host cells.

    • Tiago Santos-Ferreira
    • , Sílvia Llonch
    •  & Marius Ader

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transplantation of healthy photoreceptor cells has been shown to rescue blindness. Here, the authors show that rather than donor cells integrating into the host retina, the predominant mechanism underlying this rescue involves exchange of cytoplasmic material between donor and host cells in vivo.

    • R. A. Pearson
    • , A. Gonzalez-Cordero
    •  & R. R. Ali

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Efficient coding suggests that adapting gain to match the varying stimulus statistics should help in optimizing behaviour. Here the authors show that adaptation in motion sensitive neurons maximizes information and improves movement accuracy in pursuit eye movements.

    • Bing Liu
    • , Matthew V. Macellaio
    •  & Leslie C. Osborne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Retinal waves are important for visual system development. However, the mechanism involved in their generation remains largely unknown. Here using in vivotwo-photon imaging the authors identify the presence of retinal waves in zebrafish larvae and find that they are initiated at bipolar cells via presynaptic NMDARs.

    • Rong-wei Zhang
    • , Xiao-quan Li
    •  & Jiu-lin Du

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The detection limit of human vision has remained unclear. Using a quantum light source capable of generating single-photon states of light, authors here report that humans can perceive a single photon incidence on the eye with a probability above chance.

    • Jonathan N. Tinsley
    • , Maxim I. Molodtsov
    •  & Alipasha Vaziri

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mantis shrimps are known to display large pitch, yaw and torsional eye rotations. Here, the authors show that these eye movements allow mantis shrimp to orientate particular photoreceptors in order to better discriminate the polarization of light.

    • Ilse M. Daly
    • , Martin J. How
    •  & Nicholas W. Roberts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perceiving the size of objects is subjective. Here the authors show that these subjective differences in size perception can be explained by the individual variance in spatial tuning of neuronal populations in the primary visual cortex.

    • Christina Moutsiana
    • , Benjamin de Haas
    •  & D. Samuel Schwarzkopf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microglia play key roles during early neurodevelopment. Here the authors show that microglia are important mediators of ocular dominance plasticity (ODP). Microglia respond to monocular deprivation during the visual critical period, and disrupting microglial P2Y12 purinergic receptor abrogates ODP.

    • G. O. Sipe
    • , R. L. Lowery,
    •  & A. K. Majewska

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual and auditory systems influence each other during development. Here, the authors show that the onset of eyelid opening regulates critical points during which the auditory cortex is sensitive to hearing loss or the restoration of hearing

    • Todd M. Mowery
    • , Vibhakar C. Kotak
    •  & Dan H. Sanes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Primates acquire visual information through rapid saccadic eye movements, although little is known about their effects on neural processing of visual inputs. Here the authors demonstrate that saccades produce modulations of visual cortical processing that likely originate in the thalamus.

    • James M. McFarland
    • , Adrian G. Bondy
    •  & Daniel A. Butts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A key question in neuroscience is understanding how the brain distinguishes self-generated motion from motion in the external world. Here the authors demonstrate that the response of primary visual cortical neurons to a moving stimulus depends on whether the motion was self- or externally generated.

    • Xoana G. Troncoso
    • , Michael B. McCamy
    •  & Susana Martinez-Conde

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Corollary discharges inform the central nervous system about impending motor activity. Here, Chagnaud et al. show that, in Xenopustadpoles, shared efferent neural pathways to the inner ear and lateral line adjust the sensitivity of sensory afferents during locomotor activity.

    • Boris P. Chagnaud
    • , Roberto Banchi
    •  & Hans Straka

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sensory cortical tuning is shaped by experience to facilitate coding of features that are predictive of behaviourally relevant outcomes. Here the authors demonstrate that rapid behaviourally driven retuning of human visual cortex involves top–down projections as well as local inhibitory interactions.

    • Lisa M. McTeague
    • , L. Forest Gruss
    •  & Andreas Keil

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The mammalian retina is a modular brain region, in which cell layers are of uniform thickness but the molecular mechanism controlling this process is not well understood. Here the authors identify a regulatory network consisting of the long noncoding RNA Rncr4, RNA helicase Ddx3x and miR-183/96/182 that controls the even distribution of cells across layers.

    • Jacek Krol
    • , Ilona Krol
    •  & Witold Filipowicz

  • Article |

    The transcriptional regulation of morphogenetic effectors during eye development is poorly understood. Here, the authors show that transcription of an endocytosis regulator Opois crucial for the neural retina development in zebrafish and activated by the interaction of the transcription factor Vsx2 and retinal enhancer H6_10137.

    • Ines Gago-Rodrigues
    • , Ana Fernández-Miñán
    •  & Juan R. Martinez-Morales

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