PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - William G. P. Mayner
AU  - William Marshall
AU  - Yazan N. Billeh
AU  - Saurabh R. Gandhi
AU  - Shiella Caldejon
AU  - Andrew Cho
AU  - Fiona Griffin
AU  - Nicole Hancock
AU  - Sophie Lambert
AU  - Eric K. Lee
AU  - Jennifer A. Luviano
AU  - Kyla Mace
AU  - Chelsea Nayan
AU  - Thuyanh V. Nguyen
AU  - Kat North
AU  - Sam Seid
AU  - Ali Williford
AU  - Chiara Cirelli
AU  - Peter A. Groblewski
AU  - Jerome Lecoq
AU  - Giulio Tononi
AU  - Christof Koch
AU  - Anton Arkhipov
TI  - Measuring Stimulus-Evoked Neurophysiological Differentiation in Distinct Populations of Neurons in Mouse Visual Cortex
AID  - 10.1523/ENEURO.0280-21.2021
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - eneuro
PG  - ENEURO.0280-21.2021
VI  - 9
IP  - 1
4099  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/9/1/ENEURO.0280-21.2021.short
4100  - http://www.eneuro.org/content/9/1/ENEURO.0280-21.2021.full
SO  - eNeuro2022 Jan 01; 9
AB  - Despite significant progress in understanding neural coding, it remains unclear how the coordinated activity of large populations of neurons relates to what an observer actually perceives. Since neurophysiological differences must underlie differences among percepts, differentiation analysis—quantifying distinct patterns of neurophysiological activity—has been proposed as an “inside-out” approach that addresses this question. This methodology contrasts with “outside-in” approaches such as feature tuning and decoding analyses, which are defined in terms of extrinsic experimental variables. Here, we used two-photon calcium imaging in mice of both sexes to systematically survey stimulus-evoked neurophysiological differentiation (ND) in excitatory neuronal populations in layers (L)2/3, L4, and L5 across five visual cortical areas (primary, lateromedial, anterolateral, posteromedial, and anteromedial) in response to naturalistic and phase-scrambled movie stimuli. We find that unscrambled stimuli evoke greater ND than scrambled stimuli specifically in L2/3 of the anterolateral and anteromedial areas, and that this effect is modulated by arousal state and locomotion. By contrast, decoding performance was far above chance and did not vary substantially across areas and layers. Differentiation also differed within the unscrambled stimulus set, suggesting that differentiation analysis may be used to probe the ethological relevance of individual stimuli.