Distinct Organization of Two Cortico-Cortical Feedback Pathways

Authors

Shan Shen
Xiaolong Jiang
Federico Scala
Jiakun Fu
Paul Fahey
Dmitry Kobak
Zhenghuan Tan
Na Zhou
Jacob Reimer
Fabian Sinz
Andreas S Tolias

Publication Date

10-27-2022

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-022-33883-9

PMID

36302912

PMCID

PMC9613627

PubMedCentral® Posted Date

10-27-2022

PubMedCentral® Full Text Version

Post-print

Published Open-Access

yes

Keywords

Mice, Animals, Feedback, Interneurons, Pyramidal Cells, Vasoactive Intestinal Peptide, Extrastriate cortex, Barrel cortex

Abstract

Neocortical feedback is critical for attention, prediction, and learning. To mechanically understand its function requires deciphering its cell-type wiring. Recent studies revealed that feedback between primary motor to primary somatosensory areas in mice is disinhibitory, targeting vasoactive intestinal peptide-expressing interneurons, in addition to pyramidal cells. It is unknown whether this circuit motif represents a general cortico-cortical feedback organizing principle. Here we show that in contrast to this wiring rule, feedback between higher-order lateromedial visual area to primary visual cortex preferentially activates somatostatin-expressing interneurons. Functionally, both feedback circuits temporally sharpen feed-forward excitation eliciting a transient increase–followed by a prolonged decrease–in pyramidal cell activity under sustained feed-forward input. However, under feed-forward transient input, the primary motor to primary somatosensory cortex feedback facilitates bursting while lateromedial area to primary visual cortex feedback increases time precision. Our findings argue for multiple cortico-cortical feedback motifs implementing different dynamic non-linear operations.