AUTHOR=Kong Chui , Wang Yangzhen , Xiao Guihua 

TITLE=Neuron populations across layer 2-6 in the mouse visual cortex exhibit different coding abilities in the awake mice

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 17 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncel.2023.1238777

DOI=10.3389/fncel.2023.1238777

ISSN=1662-5102

ABSTRACT=The visual cortex is a key region in the mouse brain, responsible for processing visual information. Comprised of six distinct layers, each with unique neuronal types and connections, the visual cortex exhibits diverse decoding properties across its layers. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between visual stimulus decoding properties and the cortical layers of the visual cortex while considering how this relationship varies across different decoders and brain regions. Our findings indicate that the decoding accuracy of neuronal populations with consistent sizes varies among visual cortical layers for visual stimuli such as drift gratings and natural images. Specifically, layer 4 neurons in VISp exhibited significantly higher decoding accuracy for visual stimulus identity compared to other layers. However, in VISm, the decoding accuracy of neuronal populations with the same size in layer 2/3 was higher than that in layer 4, despite the overall accuracy being lower than that in VISp and VISl. We also tested various types of decoders for visual cortex decoding. The variation in decoding performance across layers is consistent among decoders, with SVM surpassing other decoders in terms of accuracy. Interestingly, the difference in decoding accuracy across different imaging depths was not associated with the mean orientation selectivity index (OSI) and the mean direction selectivity index(DSI) neurons but showed a significant positive correlation with the mean reliability and mean signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of each layer's neuron population. We reached the above conclusions by analyzing two publicly available datasets obtained through two-photon microscopy of visual cortex neuronal responses.