Convergence of Cortical and Thalamic Origins of Free Behavior Modulation of Mouse Primary Visual Cortex

The quality of sensory information flow in the brain may be affected by uninstructed free animal behavior. However, the specific circuit pathways that merge sensory and free behavior remain obscure. In mouse primary visual cortex (V1), we combine two-photon calcium imaging of cortical neurons and thalamo-cortical LGN (lateral geniculate nucleus) boutons with simultaneous measurements of facial movements. When controlling for spurious time-structured nonsense correlations, we observed representations of both eye movements and non-ocular facial movement features in both LGN bouton and V1 cortical neuron activity during grating input stimulation. Further, the correlation between V1 neurons and facial movement is larger for grating stimulation compared to blank stimulation, likely due to the integration of LGN inputs and modulation of V1 from higher brain centers during grating stimulation. Together, our results suggest a convergence of uninstructed non-visual signals from a persistent top-down pathway and a stimulus-gated bottom-up pathway in primary visual cortex.