Data for: Distinguishing externally- from saccade-induced motion in visual cortex

Distinguishing sensory stimuli caused by changes in the environment from those caused by an animal’s own actions is a hallmark of sensory processing. Saccades are rapid eye movements that shift the image on the retina. How visual systems differentiate motion of the image induced by saccades from actual motion in the environment is not fully understood. Here, we discovered that in mouse primary visual cortex (V1), the two types of motion evoke distinct activity patterns. This is because during saccades, V1 combines the visual input with a strong non-visual input arriving from the thalamic pulvinar nucleus. The non-visual input triggers responses that are specific to the direction of the saccade, and the visual input triggers responses that are specific to the direction of the shift of the stimulus on the retina, yet the preferred directions of these two responses are uncorrelated. Thus, the pulvinar input ensures differential V1 responses to external and self-generated motion. This dataset supporting our findings contains extracellular recording data around the time of saccades from V1 and thalamic nuclei under various experimental conditions.

Methods
The dataset was generated from electrophysiology data obtained through extracellular probes and eye tracking data. All data were processed using Matlab 2018a. Detailed description of the data files is found in the README. For detailed collection methods, refer to the associated manuscript "Distinguishing externally- from self-induced motion in visual cortex", Miura and Scanziani, Nature (in press).