Recruitment of frontal sensory circuits during visual discrimination.

A long-range circuit linking the medial frontal cortex to the primary visual cortex (V1) has been proposed to mediate visual selective attention in mice during visually guided behavior. Here, we use in vivo two-photon functional imaging to measure the endogenous activity of axons of A24b/M2 neurons from this region projecting to layer 1 of V1 (A24b/M2-V1) in mice either passively viewing stimuli or performing a go/no-go visually guided task. We observe that while A24b/M2-V1 are recruited under these conditions, this is not linked to enhancement of neural or behavioral measures of sensory coding.

RPG: A low-cost, open-source, high-performance solution for displaying visual stimuli.

Background: The development of new high throughput approaches for neuroscience such as high-density silicon probes and 2-photon imaging have led to a renaissance in visual neuroscience. However, generating the stimuli needed to evoke activity in the visual system still represents a non-negligible difficulty for experimentalists. While several widely used software toolkits exist to deliver such stimuli, they all suffer from some shortcomings.