Negative prediction errors in V1 excitatory neurons during sequential oddball paradigms

Determine whether excitatory neurons in primary visual cortex (V1) exhibit negative prediction error responses during sequential oddball paradigms, i.e., whether their activity increases when the magnitude of the sensory input is smaller than predicted or omitted relative to learned expectations.

Background

Experimental studies in mouse visual cortex report robust positive prediction error-like responses in excitatory neurons to novel stimuli in oddball paradigms, but omission trials often fail to evoke comparable responses in these cells. This has led to the interpretation that gain modulation mechanisms may dominate, with limited evidence for negative prediction error coding by excitatory neurons in V1 during sequential oddballs.

Clarifying whether V1 excitatory neurons encode negative prediction errors in such paradigms would refine mechanistic models of predictive processing and help distinguish between interpretations based on gain modulation, divisive normalization, and explicit error computation.