Abstract
Rapid saccadic eye movements are used by animals to sample different parts of the visual scene. Previous work has investigated neural correlates of these saccades in visual cortical areas such as V1, however how saccade-responsive neurons are distributed across visual areas, cell types, and cortical layers has remained unknown. Through analyzing 818 one-hour experimental sessions from the Allen Brain Observatory, we present a large-scale analysis of saccadic behaviors in head-fixed mice and their neural correlates. We find that saccade-responsive neurons are present across visual cortex, but their distribution varies considerably by transgenically-defined cell type, cortical area, and cortical layer. We also find that saccade-responsive neurons do not exhibit distinct visual response properties from the broader neural population, suggesting the saccadic responses of these neurons are likely not predominantly visually-driven. These results provide insight into the roles played by different cell types within a broader, distributed network of sensory and motor interactions.
Significance Statement
While the existence of saccade-responsive neurons in visual cortex has been previously established, how these responses vary by transgenically-defined cell type and whether these neurons differentially process visual stimuli is unknown. In addition to identifying distinct neural cell types more likely to robustly respond to saccades, our results indicate these saccade-responsive neurons do not exhibit distinct visual responses from their non-saccade-responsive counterparts.
Footnotes
Authors report no conflict of interest.
This work was supported by the Allen Institute and the University of Washington Levinson Emerging Scholars Program. Research funding was generously provided through the University of Washington Levinson Emerging Scholars Program while the first author was an undergraduate at the University of Washington. We would also like to thank Alan Degenhart for his helpful insights while the first author was a summer intern at the Allen Institute, Dan Millman for his statistical advice, and Forrest Collman for his helpful feedback on initial manuscripts.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
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