PMID-16543459[0] Reward Timing in the Primary Visual Cortex
- the responses of a substantial fraction of neurons in the primary visual cortex evolve from those that relate solely to the physical attributes of the stimuli to those that accurately predict the timing of reward.. wow!
- rats. they put goggles on the rats to deliver full-fields retinal illumination for 400ms (isn't this cheating? full field?)
- recorded from deep layers of V1
- sensory processing does not seem to be reliable, stable, and reproducible...
- rewarded only half of the trials, to see if the plasticity was a result of reward delivery or association of stimuli and reward.
- after 5-7 sessions of training, neurons began to respond to the poststimulus reward time.
- this was actually independent of reward delivery - only dependent on the time.
- reward-related activity was only driven by the dominant eye.
- individual neurons predict reward time quite accurately. (wha?)
- responses continued even if the animal was no longer doing the task.
- is this an artifact? of something else? what's going on? the suggest that it could be caused by subthreshold activity due to recurrent connections amplified by dopamine.
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