Continuous Flash Suppression responses in mouse visual cortex: stimulus laterality and anesthesia effects

We investigated whether binocularly conflicting stimuli adapted from primate binocular rivalry studies could induce binocular response suppression in mouse visual cortex. We presented binocularly conflicting stimuli adapted from the paradigm of continuous flash suppression to awake and anesthetized mice and examined neuronal responses in visual areas V1 and LM. Neurons often showed a preference for the left or right eye where a monocular grating was presented, and their responses were modulated by presenting a conflicting flashing Mondrian stimulus to the other eye. The direction of this modulation depended on whether neurons preferentially responded to contralateral or ipsilateral gratings. Responses of cells with a preference for ipsilateral gratings were suppressed during binocular conflict, while contralateral-preferring cells were less suppressed or even enhanced by binocular conflict. Binocular conflict modulation continued to occur under anesthesia, but response recovery after intermittent binocular conflict only occurred in awake mice. Responses to Mondrians were modulated by binocular conflict in a similar fashion as those to grating stimuli, which suggests that mouse binocular conflict processing exhibits a distinctive dependency on stimulus laterality over other stimulus features. Finally, a canonical binocular rivalry model could be successfully fitted to our data but lacked sufficient competitive inhibition and adaptation strength to create oscillatory activity under binocular conflict.