Behavioral origin of sound-evoked activity in visual cortex

Abstract

AbstractSensory cortices are increasingly thought to encode multisensory information. For instance, primary visual cortex (V1) appears to be influenced by sounds. Here we show that sound-evoked responses in mouse V1 are low-dimensional, similar across neurons and across brains, and can be explained by highly stereotyped uninstructed movements of eyes and body. Thus, neural activity previously interpreted as being sensory or multisensory may have a behavioral origin.