A latent pool of neurons silenced by sensory-evoked inhibition can be recruited to enhance perception.

A latent pool of neurons silenced by sensory-evoked inhibition can be recruited to enhance perception.

Highlights

All-optical interrogation of barrel cortex during bilateral whisker discrimination.

Sparse coding of contralateral and ipsilateral whisker information.

Selective sensory-evoked inhibition helps ensure sparse coding.

Optogenetic recruitment of stimulus non-coding neurons can aid perception.

Authors

In brief

Gauld et al. use all-optical interrogation to probe sparse coding in the barrel cortex. They find that targeted photostimulation of task-silent neurons evokes perceptual choice bias and that these neurons are selectively suppressed by inhibition during whisker processing. Their findings show that silent neurons can be recruited to enhance behavior.