Fig. 6: Extended causal requirement of V1 generalizes to visuotactile side detection.
From: Multisensory task demands temporally extend the causal requirement for visual cortex in perception

a Schematic of the visuotactile two-sided detection task in which mice reported the side of visual and/or tactile stimulation. b Psychometric fits for visual and tactile detection for each mouse trained in the UST and MST version of the task. Same conventions as in Fig. 1c–e, with the x-axis running left for visual/tactile stimuli presented to the left side and right for visual/tactile stimuli presented to the right side. Visual and tactile intensities were normalized for rendering purposes. c Average z-scored firing rate of responsive V1 neurons during visual (max contrast) and catch trials, split by trial outcome. Only neurons from MST mice are shown. The dashed blue line indicates the onset of optogenetic silencing. Similar to Task A, contralateral hits elicit more late activity compared to misses. Also note the weak early transient activity during FA trials (analogously to Task A, see Fig. 2e). Shaded area: bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. d Visual d-prime across V1 inactivation conditions. Early V1 inactivation (left) impaired the detection performance of contralateral threshold-level visual stimuli in both UST (ANOVA, n = 7 sessions, F(1,14) = 24.57, p = 0.0006318) and MST (ANOVA, n = 6, F(1,12) = 17.93, p = 0.0023), without effect on ipsilateral threshold-level stimuli nor contralateral maximum-level stimuli. Late silencing (right) only affected detection performance of contralateral threshold stimuli in MST mice (ANOVA, n = 7 sessions, F(1,14) = 45.14, p = 0.000036), but not in UST mice (ANOVA, n = 7, F(1,14) = 2.15, p = 0.164). **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. Each corrected for four multiple comparisons (Bonferroni-Holm). Errorbars denote inter-quartile range. e Reduction in d-prime by late silencing correlated with the median reaction time on corresponding control trials (ANOVA, n = 30 conditions, F(1,26) = 9.785, p = 0.00427, r2 = 0.7056). Each dot represents a session.