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A flexible Python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice

Natural scenes are composed of a wide range of edge angles and spatial frequencies, with a strong overrepresentation of vertical and horizontal edges. Correspondingly, many mammalian species are much better at discriminating these cardinal orientations compared to obliques. A potential reason for th...

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Autores principales: Wiesbrock, Christopher, Musall, Simon, Kampa, Björn M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9588922/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36299493
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncel.2022.866109
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author Wiesbrock, Christopher
Musall, Simon
Kampa, Björn M.
author_facet Wiesbrock, Christopher
Musall, Simon
Kampa, Björn M.
author_sort Wiesbrock, Christopher
collection PubMed
description Natural scenes are composed of a wide range of edge angles and spatial frequencies, with a strong overrepresentation of vertical and horizontal edges. Correspondingly, many mammalian species are much better at discriminating these cardinal orientations compared to obliques. A potential reason for this increased performance could be an increased number of neurons in the visual cortex that are tuned to cardinal orientations, which is likely to be an adaptation to the natural scene statistics. Such biased angular tuning has recently been shown in the mouse primary visual cortex. However, it is still unknown if mice also show a perceptual dominance of cardinal orientations. Here, we describe the design of a novel custom-built touchscreen chamber that allows testing natural scene perception and orientation discrimination performance by applying different task designs. Using this chamber, we applied an iterative convergence towards orientation discrimination thresholds for cardinal or oblique orientations in different cohorts of mice. Surprisingly, the expert discrimination performance was similar for both groups but showed large inter-individual differences in performance and training time. To study the discrimination of cardinal and oblique stimuli in the same mice, we, therefore, applied, a different training regime where mice learned to discriminate cardinal and oblique gratings in parallel. Parallel training revealed a higher task performance for cardinal orientations in an early phase of the training. The performance for both orientations became similar after prolonged training, suggesting that learning permits equally high perceptual tuning towards oblique stimuli. In summary, our custom-built touchscreen chamber offers a flexible tool to test natural visual perception in rodents and revealed a training-induced increase in the perception of oblique gratings. The touchscreen chamber is entirely open-source, easy to build, and freely available to the scientific community to conduct visual or multimodal behavioral studies. It is also based on the FAIR principles for data management and sharing and could therefore serve as a catalyst for testing the perception of complex and natural visual stimuli across behavioral labs.
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spelling pubmed-95889222022-10-25 A flexible Python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice Wiesbrock, Christopher Musall, Simon Kampa, Björn M. Front Cell Neurosci Cellular Neuroscience Natural scenes are composed of a wide range of edge angles and spatial frequencies, with a strong overrepresentation of vertical and horizontal edges. Correspondingly, many mammalian species are much better at discriminating these cardinal orientations compared to obliques. A potential reason for this increased performance could be an increased number of neurons in the visual cortex that are tuned to cardinal orientations, which is likely to be an adaptation to the natural scene statistics. Such biased angular tuning has recently been shown in the mouse primary visual cortex. However, it is still unknown if mice also show a perceptual dominance of cardinal orientations. Here, we describe the design of a novel custom-built touchscreen chamber that allows testing natural scene perception and orientation discrimination performance by applying different task designs. Using this chamber, we applied an iterative convergence towards orientation discrimination thresholds for cardinal or oblique orientations in different cohorts of mice. Surprisingly, the expert discrimination performance was similar for both groups but showed large inter-individual differences in performance and training time. To study the discrimination of cardinal and oblique stimuli in the same mice, we, therefore, applied, a different training regime where mice learned to discriminate cardinal and oblique gratings in parallel. Parallel training revealed a higher task performance for cardinal orientations in an early phase of the training. The performance for both orientations became similar after prolonged training, suggesting that learning permits equally high perceptual tuning towards oblique stimuli. In summary, our custom-built touchscreen chamber offers a flexible tool to test natural visual perception in rodents and revealed a training-induced increase in the perception of oblique gratings. The touchscreen chamber is entirely open-source, easy to build, and freely available to the scientific community to conduct visual or multimodal behavioral studies. It is also based on the FAIR principles for data management and sharing and could therefore serve as a catalyst for testing the perception of complex and natural visual stimuli across behavioral labs. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-10-10 /pmc/articles/PMC9588922/ /pubmed/36299493 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncel.2022.866109 Text en Copyright © 2022 Wiesbrock, Musall and Kampa. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Cellular Neuroscience
Wiesbrock, Christopher
Musall, Simon
Kampa, Björn M.
A flexible Python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice
title A flexible Python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice
title_full A flexible Python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice
title_fullStr A flexible Python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice
title_full_unstemmed A flexible Python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice
title_short A flexible Python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice
title_sort flexible python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice
topic Cellular Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9588922/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36299493
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncel.2022.866109
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