A large-scale standardized physiological survey reveals functional organization of the mouse visual cortex

To understand how the brain processes sensory information to guide behavior, we must know how stimulus representations are transformed throughout the visual cortex. Here we report an open, large-scale physiological survey of activity in the awake mouse visual cortex: the Allen Brain Observatory Visual Coding dataset. This publicly available dataset includes cortical activity from nearly 60,000 neurons from 6 visual areas, 4 layers, and 12 transgenic mouse lines from 243 adult mice, in response to a systematic set of visual stimuli. We classify neurons based on joint reliabilities to multiple stimuli and validate this functional classification with models of visual responses. While most classes are characterized by responses to specific subsets of the stimuli, the largest class is not reliably responsive to any of the stimuli and becomes progressively larger in higher visual areas. These classes reveal a functional organization wherein putative dorsal areas show specialization for visual motion signals.