Development and Binocular Matching of Orientation Selectivity in Visual Cortex: A Computational Model

In mouse visual cortex, right after eye-opening binocular cells have different orientation preferences for input from the two eyes. With normal visual experience during a critical period, these orientation preferences shift and eventually become well matched. To gain insight into the matching process, we developed a computational model of a cortical cell receiving - via plastic synapses - orientation selective inputs that are individually monocular. The model captures the experimentally observed matching of the orientation preferences, the dependence of matching on ocular dominance of the cell, and the relationship between the degree of matching and the resulting monocular orientation selectivity. Moreover, our model puts forward testable predictions: i) the matching speed increases with initial ocular dominance and decreases with initial orientation selectivity; ii) matching proceeds faster than the sharpening of the orientation selectivity, suggesting that orientation selectivity is not a driving force for the matching process; iii) there are two main routes to matching: the preferred orientations either drift towards each other or one of the orientations switches suddenly. The latter occurs for cells with large initial mismatch and can render the cell monocular. We expect that these results provide insight more generally into the development of neuronal systems that integrate inputs from multiple sources, including different sensory modalities. New & Noteworthy Animals gather information through multiple modalities (vision, audition, touch, etc). These information streams have to be merged coherently to provide a meaningful representation of the world. Thus, for neurons in visual cortex V1 the orientation selectivities for inputs from the two eyes have to match to enable binocular vision. We analyze the postnatal process underlying this matching using computational modeling. It captures recent experimental results and reveals interdependence between matching, ocular dominance, and orientation selectivity.