Firing properties of V1 and lateral of prefrontal cortex neurons in the common marmoset during naturalistic vision

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Jarrod Dowdall¹, Juan Pimiento Caicedo¹, Mohamad Abbass^1,2, Susheel Vijayraghavan¹, Michael Feyerabend¹, Julio Martinez-Trujillo¹; ¹Robarts Research Institute and Brain and Mind Institute, Western University, Canada, ²Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences, London Health Sciences Centre, Western University, Canada

Decades of single unit recordings across cortical visual areas have revealed a systematic gradient of stimulus selectivity, receptive field size, and task dependency which increases from V1 to PFC, and this pattern is thought to reflect a cortical hierarchy of visual processing. In addition, anatomical and histological studies have shown there is a systematic change in cortical layer thickness, neuron morphology, cell density and cell type across the cortical hierarchy. These anatomical differences have strong implications for types of spiking behavior that should be observed across the visual hierarchy, yet few studies have directly compared the patterns and features of spiking activity across cortical areas. Furthermore, even fewer studies have related the pattern and characteristics of spiking activity across the visual areas to the kinds of cognitive operations each area may subserve. In this study we investigated the firing characteristics of simultaneously recorded neurons in V1 and PFC with neuropixels probes in the awake behaving marmoset. We found systematic differences in the firing characteristics of neurons between V1 and PFC. For instance, V1 neurons tended to have higher firing rates than neurons in PFC, and the activity of V1 neurons tended to be more modulated by eye movements and low-level stimulus features compared to PFC neurons. These results are consistent with the proposition that the activity of neurons in V1 is primarily dictated by processing the features of stimuli that are immediately visible to the animal, whereas the activity of PFC reflects the task, goals and intentions of the animal.

Topic Area: OTHER