Allen Institute OpenScope - Vismo

It is essential for animals to detect the presence of predators or prey, even while they move themselves. Relative motion between a visual figure (e.g., predator or prey) and the background is therefore a highly relevant stimulus in the visual domain. Much less is known about the neural basis of cortical motion processing in mice and about figure-ground interactions in particular, although they offer much better access to studies of the underlying cortical circuits. For grating stimuli, recent studies in mice have highlighted the role of interneurons in shaping center-surround interactions in the primary visual cortex (V1). Somatostatin cells (SSTs) mediate suppressive surrounds of pyramidal cells (PCs), with this suppression being reduced or abolished by changes in the orientation of the surround relative to the center. VIP interneurons (VIPs), targeting SSTs, play a role in this modulation. The balance between SSTs and VIPs determines whether the surround has a suppressive or reinforcing effect in V1. In primates, higher visual areas (MT and MST) exhibit selectivity for motion direction, motion coherence, and strong center-surround interactions. V1 is necessary to discriminate different motion directions, but specific higher visual areas are particularly informative about visual motion and sensitive to coherent motion stimuli, pointing at reinforcing surrounds (integration), whereas V1 is often suppressed by these spatially extensive displays. This dataset characterizes the tuning of six different visual cortical regions (VISp, VISl, VISal, VISrl, VISam, and VISpm) and four different cell types (PCs, PV, SST, and VIP) to random-dot kinematograms (RDKs) of different directions, different coherence levels, and different offsets between local/center and global/surround motion. A stimulus was developed to explore motion processing using RDKs for isolating motion selectivity without confounds through orientation selectivity. The main stimulus set consisted of white RDKs on a black background with a fixed density, size, speed, and infinite lifetime of dots. A central area of ~25° is defined as the "center" and the rest of the screen is the "surround". The stimulus set includes variations of 8 center directions, 4 surround directions, their relative offset angle, and RDK-coherence level. The display is on for 1 s with an intertrial interval of 0.5 s. The dataset also includes receptive field mapping with 20° Gabors to be able to determine units with receptive fields in the center region, as well as a set of drifting gratings at 8 directions for comparison. A period of a blank, isoluminant gray screen is also included for determining spontaneous activity levels.