Figure 4

Incidental network state influences visually evoked responses.

(A) Visual stimuli comprising prey-like moving spots were presented to larvae during light-sheet imaging. (B) Average firing rate of tectal cells during presentation of leftwards moving spots at high (top) and low (bottom) elevation. (C) Estimation of neuronal excitability (linear drive) based on recent ongoing activity and model parameters. (D) Examples of nine neurons from one fish for which model-estimated pre-stimulus linear drive explained visually evoked activity. Each point corresponds to one stimulus presentation. r² values shown for a threshold-linear fit. (E) Left: Cumulative distribution of r² values for threshold-linear fits of visual responses as a function of model-estimated linear drive (with a positive slope constraint). N=56,000 neurons in 7 fish. Linear drive was estimated using the optimized or baseline model parameters (blue and red, respectively) or from randomly chosen sequences of ongoing activity, using the optimized model parameters (grey). Right: Median r² values across neurons from each animal. Only cells with non-zero median visual response were included. Thin lines indicate median values for individual fish, bars show mean ± SEM across fish, p-values for paired t-test.