Koji Ikezoe

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Yamanashi

Cerebellar climbing fibers convey sensorimotor information and their errors, which are used for motor control and learning. Furthermore, they represent reward-related information. Despite such functional diversity of climbing fiber signals, it is still unclear whether each climbing fiber conveys the information of single or multiple modalities and...

Cerebellar climbing fibers (CFs) convey sensorimotor information and their errors, which are used for motor control and learning. Furthermore, they represent reward-related information. Despite such functional diversity of CF signals, it is still unclear whether each CF conveys the information of single or multiple modalities and how the CFs convey...

Reaching, grasping, and retrieving movements are essential to our daily lives and are common in many mammalian species. To understand the mechanism for controlling this movement at the neural circuit level, it is necessary to observe the activity of individual neurons involved in the movement. For stable electrophysiological or optical recordings o...

Natural scenes are characterized by diverse image statistics, including various parameters of the luminance histogram, outputs of Gabor-like filters, and pairwise correlations between the filter outputs of different positions, orientations, and scales (Portilla–Simoncelli statistics). Some of these statistics capture the response properties of visu...

Natural scenes are characterized by diverse image statistics, including various parameters of the luminance histogram, outputs of Gabor-like filters, and pairwise correlations between the filter outputs of different positions, orientations, and scales (Potilla-Simoncelli statistics). Some of these statistics capture the response properties of visua...

Orientation preference maps (OPMs) are a prominent feature of primary visual cortex (V1) organization in many primates and carnivores. In rodents, neurons are not organized in OPMs but are instead interspersed in a “salt and pepper” fashion, although clusters of orientation-selective neurons have been reported. Does this fundamental difference refl...

In vivo calcium (Ca2+) imaging using two-photon microscopy allows activity to be monitored simultaneously from hundreds of individual neurons within a local population. While this allows us to gain important insights into how cortical neurons represent sensory information, factors such as photo-bleaching of the Ca2+ indicator limit imaging duration...

Establishment of precise neuronal connectivity in the neocortex relies on activity-dependent circuit reorganization during postnatal development; however, the nature of cortical activity during this period remains largely unknown. Using two-photon calcium imaging of the barrel cortex in vivo during the first postnatal week, we reveal that layer 4 (...

A majority of neurons in the monkey primary visual cortex (V1) are tuned to stimulus orientations. Preferred orientations and tuning strengths vary among V1 neurons. The preferred orientation of neurons gradually changes across the cortex with occasional failures of this organization. How V1 neurons are arranged by the strength of orientation tunin...

The ability to detect and discriminate sensory stimuli greatly improves with age. To better understand the neural basis of perceptual development, we studied the postnatal development of sensory responses in cortical neurons. Specifically, we analyzed neuronal responses to single-whisker deflections in the posteromedial barrel subfield (PMBSF) of t...

In the primary visual cortex (V1) of some mammals, columns of neurons with the full range of orientation preferences converge at the center of a pinwheel-like arrangement, the 'pinwheel center' (PWC). Because a neuron receives abundant inputs from nearby neurons, the neuron's position on the cortical map likely has a significant impact on its respo...

Supplementary Figures S1, S2, and S3

Thalamocortical afferents innervate both excitatory and inhibitory cells, the latter in turn producing disynaptic feedforward inhibition, thus creating fast excitation-inhibition sequences in the cortical cells. Since this inhibition is disynaptic, the time lag of the excitation-inhibition sequence could be approximately 2-3 ms, while it is often a...

Mammalian primary visual cortex (V1) contains a functional map of orientation preference. Within the orientation preference map, neurons aggregate in two different local patterns. Neurons with similar orientation preferences gather within orientation domains, whereas neurons with all different orientation preferences converge at the center of pinwh...