Highly selective visual receptive fields in mouse frontal cortex

Abstract

A hallmark of the mammalian visual system is spatial information processing. This relies on feedforward activity spanning multiple brain areas, and on interconnected neurons with spatial receptive fields (RFs) aligned across these areas. This organization allows neurons to iteratively analyze information from the same point of the visual field. It remains unclear if this framework extends beyond the visual system, especially into cognitive areas of frontal cortex that exert feedback control over early sensory areas. Here, we surveyed the mouse frontal cortex (anterior cingulate and secondary motor areas), and discovered neurons with low latency, highly localized visual RFs. Just like in visual cortex, responses were often highly selective for bright or dark stimuli. The responses lagged visual cortical areas by only [~]25 ms, and their RFs were comparable in size. Further, the representation of visual space in frontal cortex showed a strong bias for the central (binocular) visual field, but there was no evidence of a topographically organized retinotopic map. Importantly, these visual responses were abolished by optogenetic silencing of visual cortex, revealing a causal role for feedforward hierarchical connectivity that extends visual spatial processing directly into motor and cognitive regions of mouse frontal cortex.