Abstract
Marmoset monkeys have high acuity foveal vision and use saccadic eye movements to rapidly sample across visual locations. Each eye movement produces a wave of neural activity in primary visual cortex that includes saccadic suppression starting from the saccade onset followed by a positive post-saccadic rebound. Across the population the amplitude of suppression and rebound varied considerably, as well as latency of these components (Parker et al., 2023). Here, we investigated how saccadic-related neural responses were related to different cell types in V1 focusing on distinctions by cortical layer (superficial, input, and deep) and by spike waveform shape (narrow and broad). We used linear silicon arrays to record well isolated single units across laminar depths in one monkey that freely viewed either natural images or a blank screen. We found that narrow and broad spiking waveforms were distributed bi-modally as found in previous studies, but this was only the case in superficial and deep layers. By contrast, the input layer showed a unimodal distribution of durations which could reflect underlying differences in its anatomy as the V1 input layer is distinguished by stellate neurons and calbindin expressing inhibitory neurons (Bourne et al, 2007). We found the saccade modulation among narrow spiking neurons in all layers showed little suppression and had earlier latency positive responses. The differences between narrow and broad spiking responses were weaker but significant in the input layer, and grew the strongest in deeper layers, where narrow spiking cells showed the earliest positive responses. These early positive responses among narrow spiking cells could play a role in mediating suppression to the other cell classes.