Contextual Drive of Neuronal Responses in Mouse Primary Visual Cortex in the Absence of Feedforward Input (V1)

Neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) respond to stimuli in their receptive field (RF), which is defined by the feedforward input from the retina. However, V1 neurons are also sensitive to contextual information outside their RF, even if the RF itself is unstimulated. In this dataset, we examined the cortical circuits for V1 contextual responses to grey disks superimposed on different backgrounds in the mouse. We used laminar electrophysiological measurements spanning the entire cortex in V1 to determine the precise activation onset of neurons in different layers and used 2-photon imaging in V1 to measure the activation patterns of pyramidal neurons as well as the three main classes of interneurons: parvalbumin (PV), somatostatin (SST) and vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) positive interneurons. We further probed the contribution of VIP-neurons by optogenetically inhibiting VIP-neurons and measuring the response in V1. Finally, we investigated the relation between contextual drive and the perceptual interpretation of the visual scene. We created visual stimuli in which the blank region was perceived as either a figure or a background using dynamic occlusion cues and measured the evoked activity in V1 using electrophysiology. Our data can be reused in studies investigating contextual activation in V1 or studies evaluating the effect of VIP-inhibition.