Learned spatiotemporal sequence recognition and prediction in primary visual cortex

Learning to recognize and predict temporal sequences is fundamental to sensory perception, and is impaired in several neuropsychiatric disorders, but little is known about where and how this occurs in the brain. We discovered that repeated presentations of a visual sequence over a course of days causes evoked response potentiation in mouse V1 that is highly specific for stimulus order and timing. Remarkably, after V1 is trained to recognize a sequence, cortical activity regenerates the full sequence even when individual stimulus elements are omitted. This novel neurophysiological report of sequence learning advances the understanding of how the brain makes “intelligent guesses” based on limited information to form visual percepts and suggests that it is possible to study the mechanistic basis of this high–level cognitive ability by studying low–level sensory systems.