Allen Institute Openscope - Illusion project

Much of sensory neuroscience has focused on how the brain faithfully represents sensory information. However, sensory information is often incomplete and ambiguous. Hence, the brain must rely on an internal model of the sensory world to infer a coherent percept. Illusions reveal rational mistakes in perceptual inference, yielding unique insights into the brain’s internal model. Here, we utilized illusory contours (ICs) to study the microcircuit mechanisms underlying the perceptual inference of an edge. Evidence for IC perception has been shown in multiple species, including mice. Neural correlates of IC perception have also been identified, i.e., neurons that respond to ICs with the same receptive field and feature selectivity (e.g., orientation tuning) as for real edges, despite the lack of feedforward sensory drive. Our goal was to investigate how neocortical microcircuits give rise to illusory responses in IC encoders. In addition, we aimed to investigate whether the microcircuit implementation of IC encoding is common across the visual cortex hierarchy.

感觉神经科学（sensory neuroscience）的诸多研究均围绕大脑如何精准表征感觉信息展开。然而，感觉信息往往既不完整又模糊，因此大脑必须依托感觉世界的内部模型，才能推断出连贯的知觉。错觉可揭示知觉推理中的理性误差，为解析大脑的内部模型提供独特洞见。本研究借助错觉轮廓（illusory contours, ICs），探究边缘知觉推理背后的微环路机制。目前已有研究在包括小鼠在内的多个物种中证实了错觉轮廓知觉的存在，同时也已鉴定出其神经关联：即那些虽无前馈感觉驱动，但能以与真实边缘一致的感受野（receptive field）和特征选择性（如方向调谐（orientation tuning））响应错觉轮廓的神经元。我们的研究目标在于阐明新皮层微环路如何催生错觉轮廓编码神经元的错觉响应，此外还希望验证：错觉轮廓编码的微环路实现机制是否在视觉皮层层级结构中普遍存在。

搜集汇总

背景与挑战

背景概述

该数据集是艾伦研究所的Openscope - Illusion项目，专注于感知推理和错觉研究，使用小鼠模型和神经像素记录技术来探索大脑内部模型。数据集包含78个文件，总大小为186 GB，采用开放获取许可，数据标准为Neurodata Without Borders，涉及电生理学和光遗传学方法，测量了LFP和Units等变量。