Anatomically resolved oscillatory bursts orchestrate visual thalamocortical activity during naturalistic stimulus viewing

Natural vision involves encoding of complex visual input, which engages a plethora of interacting circuit mechanisms. In the mammalian forebrain, one signature of such interacting circuit mechanisms is fast oscillatory dynamics, which can be reflected in the local field potential (LFP). We here used data from the Allen Neuropixels Visual Coding project to show that local visual features in naturalistic stimuli induce retinotopically specific V1 oscillations in various frequency bands. These LFP oscillations occurred in bursts, were localized to specific V1 layers, and were associated with phase coupling of V1 translaminar spiking, pointing to feature-specific circuit motifs. Finally, we discovered that these visually-induced circuit motifs occurred across a range of stimuli, suggesting that they might constitute general routes for feature-specific information flow. Together, our analyses demonstrate visually-induced, fast oscillations, which likely reflect the operation of distinct mesoscale circuits for the differential and multiplexed coding of complex visual input and feature-specific thalamo-cortical information propagation.