Grant: Project Grant

The internalization of the visual world into an inner world is essential for an organism to act on it. The construction of the internal world relies on interactions between brain areas; yet which brain areas are involved is still poorly understood. There are a myriad of conditions from autism spectrum disorder to anxiety and depression to schizophrenia where there is a maladaptation of the construction of the inner world. For example, it is estimated that most individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder have atypical sensory experiences. Neuroimaging studies in these individuals show noisier and weaker visual signals in visual cortical areas, and this has led to the hypothesis that atypical sensory experiences in autism may be due to changes in visual processing in visual cortical areas. The overall aim of this proposal is to understand how the cortex processes visual information so that we can understand where the construction of the inner world might go wrong. We have developed a visual task for mice that depends on several visual cortical areas that are highly interconnected. Here, we propose a series of experiments involving neural recordings and optogenetic perturbations of neural activity in behaving mice to determine how the involved visual cortical areas influence each other and to provide a mechanistic understanding of how their interactions enable visual processing during a perceptual task. This is a crucial step towards understanding how differences in visual processing in various conditions like autism spectrum disorder influence perception.