Neural ensemble activity depends on stimulus type in mouse primary visual cortex

Early cortical processing of visual information has long been investigated by describing the response properties such as receptive fields or orientation selectivity of individual neurons to moving gratings. However, thanks to recent technological advances, it has been become easier to record from larger neuronal populations which allow us to analyse the population responses to probe visual information processing at the population level. In the end, it is unlikely that sensory processing is a single-neuron effort but that of an entire population. Here we show how different stimulus types evoke distinct binary activity patterns (words) of simultaneous events on different sites in the anaesthetised mouse. Spontaneous activity and natural scenes indicated lower word distribution divergences than each to drifting gratings. Accounting for firing rate differences, spontaneous activity was linked to more unique patterns than stimulus-driven responses. Multidimensional scaling conveyed that pattern probability distributions clustered for spatial frequencies but not for directions. Further, drifting gratings modulated the Shannon entropy estimated on spatial patterns in a similar fashion as classical directional and spatial frequency tuning functions of neurons. This was supported by a distinct sublinear relationship between Shannon entropy and mean population firing rate.