Sensation and action are traditionally thought to involve separate brain circuits serving distinct functions: activity in early sensory areas is driven nearly exclusively by the corresponding sensory input, whereas activity in motor areas is exclusively related to movement. Recent work in mice, a major mammalian model system in neuroscience, has called for a re-evaluation of this distinction, given recent demonstrations that activity in mouse primary visual cortex (V1) depends as much on whether the mouse is running or stationary as on what visual stimulus is shown (Niell and Stryker, 2010). Neurons in V1 of virtually all mammals are selective for simple image features, a presumably critical early step of image processing that continues throughout a hierarchy of visual brain areas (Rosa and Krubitzer, 1999; Felleman and Van Essen, 1991), and this is true of mice as well (Niell and Stryker, 2008). The observation that running modulates (mouse) V1 of a comparable magnitude to the visually driven activity has motivated substantial effort in the field to understand the biological mechanisms and functional consequences of this powerful interaction between sensation and action (Keller et al., 2012; Vinck et al., 2015; Bennett et al., 2013; Saleem et al., 2013; Erisken et al., 2014; Reimer et al., 2014; Pakan et al., 2016; Polack et al., 2013; Fu et al., 2014; Mineault et al., 2016; Ayaz et al., 2013; Christensen and Pillow, 2022; Dipoppa et al., 2018).

However, these observations have all been made in rodents; similar measurements have not been made in primates. Although rodents certainly rely on vision for important behaviors (Hoy et al., 2016; Yilmaz and Meister, 2013), primates are more fundamentally visual organisms, with exquisite acuity and specialized functional characteristics such as foveas and corresponding high-resolution representations of the central visual field in V1 (Land and Fernald, 1992), in addition to a larger network of areas involved in vision (Felleman and Van Essen, 1991). While experiments that allow subjects to run while viewing visual stimuli may now be commonplace in mice, analogous experiments in nonhuman primates have remained technically daunting. It has thus remained unclear whether the large effect of running on early visual processing is a general property of mammalian brains revealed by work in mice or whether the early stages of primate visual processing are less affected by nonvisual factors. Here, we fill this major gap in cross-species understanding by taking advantage of the relatively small size and peaceable nature of the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus), which allowed us to have animals on a custom-designed treadmill and to use high-channel-count electrode arrays, including Neuropixels. Our comparative study fits into a larger emerging enterprise to assess whether substantial signals due to animal movements affect sensory processing similarly in rodents and primates (Talluri et al., 2023; Stringer et al., 2019; Musall et al., 2019).

We tested for running-based modulations in V1 of the common marmoset, a highly visual new world primate. Marmosets were head-fixed, placed on a wheel-based treadmill suited to their arboreal nature (Figure 1a), and alternated between running and not running while we presented various visual stimuli designed to assess the properties and responsiveness of V1 neurons (Figure 1b). We recorded from foveal and parafoveal neurons in two marmosets (using chronically implanted N-Form 3D electrode arrays), and in one marmoset were also able to simultaneously record from both foveal and peripheral V1 (using Neuropixels 1.0 probes). To support precise comparison to rodent V1, we used the same analysis pipeline on a publicly available mouse dataset that used matching stimuli in a treadmill paradigm (https://portal.brain-map.org/explore/circuits/visual-coding-neuropixels). This let us perform direct quantitative and statistical comparisons of the effects of running on V1 activity in a rodent and a primate.

First, we mapped the receptive fields of marmoset V1 neurons using reverse-correlation techniques adapted to free-viewing (Yates et al., 2021) while we measured gaze using a video-based eyetracker (Figure 1c). In V1 of both marmosets, we found receptive fields within the central few degrees of vision, with sizes expected at those eccentricities (1–5°, Figure 1f, blue and green; these can be compared to those in mouse, Figure 1e). As expected for primary visual cortex, marmoset V1 (both well-isolated single units and well-tuned multi-unit clusters) responded robustly to oriented gratings and exhibited orientation- (and sometimes direction-) selectivity (Yu and Rosa, 2014; Sengpiel et al., 1996), similar to that in the mouse V1 dataset (Figure 1g and h). Orientation tuning spanned a range from weak to strong tuning, with many units exhibiting strong and conventional tuning curves (Figure 1i and j).

As a first test for effects of running on V1 activity, we assessed whether running speed was correlated with aggregate V1 activity by comparing the time series of these variables throughout each session. In the mouse, such modulations are easily visually evident when inspecting the time series of neural activity and running: when the mouse runs, V1 spiking often increases substantially. Figure 2a and b shows example sessions with the maximal and median amounts of correlation between the time series of running speed and a generic low-dimensional representation of the population activity (the first principal component [PC] of the simultaneously recorded V1 trial spike counts, see ‘Materials and methods’). This correlation could be seen when running/not running alternated on slow (Figure 2a) or fast (Figure 2b) time scales.

A starkly different impression comes from visual inspection of the relationship between running and the activity of marmoset V1 neurons representing the central visual field. Any relation between V1 activity and running appears considerably smaller. In examples showing the maximal and median relationships between running and V1 activity (Figure 2c and d), V1 activity did not track running speed as clearly, although the activity did tend to increase when the monkey stopped running, explaining the modest negative correlations.

We then quantified the relationship between the timecourses of aggregate V1 activity and running across all experiments on a session-by-session basis, in both species. For mice, this confirmed a strong positive correlation (Figure 2e; median = 0.407, n = 25, p=9.04×10−5, stat = 308, Mann–Whitney U test). For marmosets, the distribution of correlations between V1 activity and running was subtly but reliably negative (Figure 2f, median = −0.033, p=0.034, stat = 101, n = 27, Mann–Whitney U test). Most importantly, the correlation between V1 activity and running was significantly different between the two species (p=6.93×10−7, stat = 934, Mann–Whitney U test). This session-level analysis confirmed that running modulations in mice are large and mostly reflect increases in response. In contrast, running modulations in marmoset foveal V1 are small, and if anything, reflect slight reductions in activity.

To perform additional quantitative tests at the level of individual V1 units, we divvied up each unit’s spiking responses to drifting gratings based on whether or not the animal was running (Figure 3). This analysis confirmed, in mouse, a tendency for large response increases during running to both the preferred orientation stimulus (Figure 3a, geometric mean ratio [running/stationary] = 1.523, 95% CI [1.469, 1.579], n = 743 tuned units) and to all visual stimuli (Figure 3b, 1.402 [1.365, 1.440], n = 1168). Many individual units had significant running modulations and were more often increases rather than decreases (803/1168 [69%] increased firing rate and 115/1168 [10%] decreased, bootstrapped t-test). In marmoset V1, there was again a modest decrease evident in the response to the preferred stimulus (Figure 3c; geometric mean ratio [running/stationary] = 0.899, 95% CI [0.851, 0.949], n = 228 tuned units). Not even modest suppression was evident in responses aggregated across all stimuli (Figure 3d, 1.011 [0.995, 1.027], n = 786). The number of significantly modulated units was relatively small and was more balanced between decreases and increases in firing rate (172/786 [22%] increased and 161/786 [20%] decreased, bootstrapped t-test). Because we performed quantitative comparisons on subsets of the data for which the stimuli were nearly identical across species, and used the same data analysis code to calculate response metrics, these analyses solidly confirm a substantial difference between the form of running modulations of V1 activity in mouse versus marmoset (log ratio of running:stationary was significantly different between mouse and marmoset for all units: p=6.62×10−99, stat = 1399874, Mann–Whitney U test, and tuned units: p=4.69×10−57, stat = 4030135). Thus, the overall impacts of running on V1 units again appear large and positive in mice, and much smaller (and perhaps slightly negative) in marmoset.

Given these apparently categorical differences between the two species at the levels of both experimental sessions (Figure 2) and individual units (Figure 3), a key question is whether mouse and marmoset visual cortices are modulated by non-visual input in fundamentally different ways. To answer this, we employed more powerful model-based neuronal population analyses that inferred trial-to-trial variations in shared gain modulations across V1 (Figure 4a and d; Whiteway et al., 2019), in a manner totally agnostic to running (or any other aspect of behavior). This shared-gain model improved descriptions of the population data over simpler models that only took the stimulus (and slow drifts in baseline firing rate) into account for all sessions (Figure 4b and c; marmoset p=1.52×10−82, stat = 27174, n = 754, Wilcoxon signed-rank test; mouse p=4.64×10−181, stat = 25966, n = 1257). This was true in both species, bolstering the emerging notion that population-level gain modulations are a general principle of mammalian V1 function (Whiteway et al., 2019; Lin et al., 2015; Arandia-Romero et al., 2016; Goris et al., 2014; Ferguson and Cardin, 2020). This shared gain term modulated more strongly in mice compared to marmosets (Figure 4e, std. dev. in mouse = 2.170 [2.106, 2.245], marmoset = 1.188 [1.072, 1.274], p<1×10−9, stat = 1013202, Mann×Whitney U test). Furthermore, in the mouse, shared gain was higher for running than stationary as estimated during stimulus presentations (mean difference 0.970 [0.761, 1.225], p~0, stat 8.017, t-test), demonstrating that a substantial portion of modulations of mouse V1 can be explained by a shared gain term that increases with running (Figure 4f, orange point). In marmoset, shared gain was slightly but reliably lower when running (mean difference = −0.125 [-0.203, -0.059], p=0.002, stat = −3.360, t-test, Figure 4f, blue point), a quantitatively very different relation to running than in mouse (p=8.77×10−9, stat = 6.615, two-sample t-test). Thus, a common mechanism (shared gain) can describe running modulations in both species, but with quantitatively different correlations with behavior that make for potentially distinct downstream impacts on perception and action.

Although our marmoset dataset focused on V1 neurons representing the central portion of the visual field, we were also able to record simultaneously from neurons with peripheral and central (foveal) receptive fields by advancing a Neuropixels probe into both the superficial portion of V1 (foveal/central) and the calcarine sulcus (peripheral), resulting in simultaneous recordings of 110 and 147 (stimulus-driven) units representing the central and peripheral portions of the visual field, respectively. Analyzing neurons with peripheral receptive fields separately revealed a difference in running modulations between these retinotopically distinct portions of V1: peripheral neurons had slightly higher stimulus-driven responses during running (aggregating over all stimuli, geometric mean ratio [running/stationary] = 1.129 [1.068, 1.194], n = 147; difference with the central units was significant, p=2.100e-03, stat = 12376, Mann–Whitney U test), and the two sessions in which we were able to perform these measurements had higher positive correlations than any sessions in our entire foveal V1 dataset (assessed by correlating running speed either with the First Neural PC or with a shared gain term). Although the foveal representation in V1 (accessible in marmosets on the dorsal surface of the brain) is slightly suppressed by running, it appears that quantitative differences exist in the peripheral representation (which we recorded from in the calcarine sulcus). This initial set of recordings suggests that subtle increases in response might occur in the peripheral representation in marmoset V1. This finding calls for a larger-scale study of how such modulations might differ across portions of the retinotopic map, and for further consideration of the implications for cross-species comparisons. An intriguing conjecture is that the primate foveal representation might be functionally unique, but that the primate peripheral representation might be more functionally similar to that of mouse V1 (Horrocks et al., 2022).

Although this is an interesting potential distinction that further work will investigate more systematically, we emphasize that the main result described earlier still holds: the effects of running are small in marmoset V1. Even though there are slightly positive modulations in the peripheral representation (and hence, are of the same sign as those in mouse), the magnitude of whatever running-correlated modulations we could measure in marmoset V1 are still small relative to those in mouse V1 (median spike rate modulation by running significantly different between mouse and marmoset calcarine/peripheral recordings: p=7.639×10−11, stat = 7967825, Mann–Whitney U test).

Finally, we assessed whether the modest running-correlated modulations we observed in marmoset V1 might be explained by eye movements. If eye movements differed when the animal ran versus when it did not run, that would mean that the retinal input differed between the two conditions (Horrocks et al., 2022). In that case, running modulations would not reflect a direct effect of running (a fundamentally non-visual effect), but rather a consequence of changes in the patterns of retinal stimulation (which we already know affects V1 responses). To test this possibility, we quantified the number of saccades per stimulus presentation, as well as saccade size (vector magnitude), and then assessed whether these eye movement metrics differed as a function of running.

We found that eye movements were quite similar between running and stationary periods, although subtle quantitative differences were revealed (Figure 5). In short, saccades were slightly more frequent and larger during running (saccade frequency during running: 2.653 Hz, 95% CI [2.600, 2.697]; stationary/not running: 2.525 Hz [2.475, 2.573]; saccade magnitude during running: 9.261° [9.140, 9.374]; stationary/not running: 8.337° [8.190, 8.470]). This result motivated us to then assess whether these running-correlated eye movement differences might quantitatively explain the running-correlated modulations of V1 response. Our initial analyses found that differences in retinal stimulation due to differences in eye movements are unlikely to explain running-correlated suppression of V1 activity. We used linear regression to estimate the relationship between number of saccades and the firing rate of each unit in each trial. This enabled us to predict how much change in firing rate we should expect given the differences in saccade rate between the running and stationary conditions. The response change predicted from saccades was much less than the already-small running-correlated changes in response we observed in our experiment. On the aggregate, saccades slightly increased activity (predicted spike rate increase during running based on saccades = 0.05 Hz; expressed as gain, <1%), and thus cannot explain the sign or magnitude of the subtle decreases we observed. In short, the decreases in V1 activity we saw in our main dataset are not likely to be explained by differential patterns of eye movements. (Likewise, the distinction we saw between running-correlated modulations in foveal versus peripheral V1 is unlikely attributable to eye movements, as we recorded simultaneously from both parts of the retinotopic map, meaning that the eye movements were the same despite the difference in modulations.)

Regrettably, the mouse dataset with which we compared our marmoset recordings did not reliably have eye video with quality required to do precise gaze estimation (at least for many of the sessions), so we could not perform a definitive analysis in mouse. However, the degree to which movement-correlated modulations of sensory processing contain a retinal contribution is an important issue (Horrocks et al., 2022), and one that we hope to tackle more directly in future cross-species studies wherein eyetracking and knowledge of individual receptive fields is highly, and equally, prioritized in mice and marmosets.

We also analyzed the pupil size from our eyetracking videos. Pupil size was ∼8% larger during running. This finding is consistent with the idea that the marmosets were in a higher arousal state during running. Such a result is at least loosely consistent with effects seen in mice (although in that literature, there is some degree of dissociation between modulations due to arousal and those due to running per se; Vinck et al., 2015). Thus, the changes in pupil size we detected do suggest that when a marmoset runs, it is likely in a higher arousal state, similar to that in mice. However, more work would be required to perform cross-species calibrations to understand how the magnitude of changes in pupil size corresponds to changes in levels of arousal. At this point, we can conclude that the differences we see in the size (and sometimes, sign) of V1 modulations across species are unlikely due to a categorical difference in a link between running and arousal in mice versus marmosets, but possible quantitative distinctions deserve further consideration.

In short, running does not affect V1 activity in marmosets like it does in mouse. The large, typically positive correlations between running and V1 activity often found in mice are simply not evident in marmosets. Although we matched our experimental protocol to mouse experiments and used the same metrics and analysis pipeline, the difference in results across species was stark. We hypothesize that this distinction holds at the level of taxonomic order, distinguishing how much behavioral state interacts with early stages of visual processing in primates versus rodents.

Diving deeper into the pattern of results, we did detect small (but statistically nonzero) modulations of marmoset V1 response correlated with running. In the foveal representation in V1 – where we made the majority of our recordings – responses on average were slightly smaller during running; in the peripheral representation, responses were slightly larger.

Despite the main result of this study being that running-correlated modulations in marmoset V1 are small, and hence quantitatively different than that in mouse V1, our population-level analyses did point towards a possible cross-species generalization. The same shared-gain model improved accounts of both mouse and marmoset V1 activity. These population-level gain modulations likely reflect modulatory inputs associated with behavioral state and arousal. This commonality connects with mechanistic knowledge of how V1 activity is modulated. The primate-rodent difference in the magnitude and sign of V1 gain modulations we observed is in fact consistent with known differences in neuromodulatory inputs related to arousal in rodent and primate V1 (Disney and Robert, 2019; Coppola and Disney, 2018). In primates, the locations of ACh receptors allow cholinergic inputs to increase the activity of the majority of GABAergic neurons and hence suppress net activity via inhibition (Disney et al., 2007; Lien and Scanziani, 2013), but pharmacologically and anatomically distinct cholinergic influences in rodent likely exert more complex effects on net activity, including disinhibition which can increase net activity (Pakan et al., 2016; Fu et al., 2014; Pfeffer et al., 2013). Our population-level analyses also lay groundwork for connections to indirect and aggregate measures of neural activity made in humans under related conditions (Chen et al., 2022; Cao et al., 2020; Benjamin et al., 2018), as well as the typically small modulations seen in primate visual cortices elicited by carefully controlled attentional tasks, which are more clear when population-level modulations are considered (Mitchell et al., 2009; Cohen and Maunsell, 2009; Rabinowitz et al., 2015).

We also performed an analysis of whether eye movements might contribute to differential visual (retinal) stimulation, which in turn could differentially modulate visually driven activity in V1 during running versus stationary periods. We found that there were subtle increases in eye movement frequency and saccade amplitude during running. However, saccades on average slightly increased V1 activity, so it seems unlikely that eye-movement-mediated changes in retinal stimulation explain the modest decreases we observed during running. We found that analysis of eye movements was difficult in some of the mouse datasets. Because receptive fields in mouse V1 can be very large, uncontrolled (and/or uncharacterized) eye movements can not only create visual modulations of the stimulus on the screen, but can also hit the edges of the monitor under some viewing conditions. A related study Talluri et al., 2023 found that eye movements (or, their effects on retinal stimulation) explained all of the modulations of V1 activity that were correlated with facial/body movements in seated macaques. Further work will be needed to understand how much eye movements play a role in both running-correlated and movement-correlated modulations in the mouse. This will require monitoring eye movements and dissecting the ensuing retinal effects from those of other (body and face) movements (Musall et al., 2019); all of these types of motor activity (and subsequent ‘sensory reafference’) may be partially correlated.

Our results (as well as those of Talluri et al., 2023) reveal a number of additional issues that should be addressed in follow-up work to even more tightly relate work across the two species. In our study, we attempted to match the overall treadmill apparatus and the visual stimuli used in the mouse studies. Even that required species-specific customization of the treadmill, as well as taking into account the higher spatial acuity of primate vision (which is why our study used much higher spatial frequencies in our set of drifting gratings). We describe how additional unresolved issues could be addressed for improved cross-species integration.

First, we analyzed pupil size and found that it was larger when the marmosets ran. At first glance, this suggests that running does indicate a more aroused internal state in the marmosets, as it likely does in mice (Vinck et al., 2015). However, it is less clear whether the magnitude of pupil size changes in marmosets corresponds to the same amount of arousal change that occurs in mice. Relative calibration of the dynamic range of pupil size (and measuring other biomarkers of arousal) may make for more satisfying inferences about internal states across species, as it has been shown that some (but not all) of running-correlated modulations are likely due to arousal (Vinck et al., 2015; Lee et al., 2014).

Second, although we found only small effects (relative to mouse) at the aggregate level, our results call for more specific investigations of modulations at the level of cell types and subcircuits (Niell and Stryker, 2010; Pakan et al., 2016; Bennett et al., 2013; Polack et al., 2013). Such investigations may reveal more nuanced effects in primate V1, using tools that can better unpack the circuitry associated with factors such as cholinergic modulation, which are known to differ in important ways across rodent and monkey (Coppola and Disney, 2018; Disney and Robert, 2019). Additionally, differences in feedback circuits also exist across the visual field representation within primate V1 (Wang et al., 2022). This – and the proposition that mouse V1 may be a better model of primate peripheral vision (Horrocks et al., 2022) – has motivated us to perform more systematic and larger-scale recordings to compare the foveal and peripheral representations.

Third, our results call for additional study across other visual areas. In mice, the large effects on V1 activity are likely to affect all subsequent stages of processing (Christensen and Pillow, 2022), but in marmosets, the small effects are less likely to have pronounced downstream effects. That said, running may directly and more strongly interact with later stages of visual processing in primates. This would be consistent with differences in where canonical computations occur across species with different numbers of visual areas (Felleman and Van Essen, 1991; Garrett et al., 2014; Scholl et al., 2013). Such measurements in primate extrastriate visual areas are already in progress in our laboratory.

Finally, larger effects of behavioral state may still be found in primate V1: other behaviors that more directly recruit active vision may reveal stronger modulations. In mice, running may have a more direct functional relation to visual processing. Marmosets may instead wish to recruit head or body movements that are not realizable in the head-fixed preparation that we used for eye-movement and neural recording. These questions will be addressed in freely moving and head-free subjects.

Although our main result is simply that running-correlated modulations in marmoset V1 are small relative to those in mouse, we did find evidence for behaviorally correlated population-level gain modulations in both species. This sort of commonality may support further cross-species generalizations that transcend simpler observations of empirical similarity or dissimilarity (Niell and Scanziani, 2021; Priebe and McGee, 2014). Further work explicating how shared basic mechanisms may ultimately result in rather different patterns of interaction between vision and action will be critical for linking our understanding of cortical function between currently preferred model organisms and across taxonomic orders. The results in this report reflect just the starting point for a larger comparative inquiry.

We performed electrophysiological recordings in V1 of two common marmosets (one male, ‘marmoset G’, and one female, ‘marmoset B’, both aged 2 years). Both subjects had chronically implanted N-form arrays (Modular Bionics, Modular Bionics, Berkeley, CA) inserted into left V1. Implantations were performed with standard surgical procedures for chronically implanted arrays in primates. Additional recordings were also performed using Neuropixels 1.0 probes (Jun et al., 2017) acutely inserted into small craniotomies (procedure described below). All experimental protocols were approved by The University of Texas Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and in accordance with National Institute of Health standards for care and use of laboratory animals.

Subjects perched quadrupedally on a 12″ diameter wheel while head-fixed facing a 24″ LCD (BenQ) monitor (resolution = 1920 × 1080 pixels, refresh rate = 120 Hz) corrected to have a linear gamma function, at a distance of 36 cm (pixels per degree = 26.03) in a dark room. Eye position was recorded via an Eyelink 1000 eye tracker (SR Research) sampling at 1 kHz. A syringe pump-operated reward line was used to deliver liquid reward to the subject. Timing events were generated using a Datapixx I/O box (VPixx) for precise temporal registration. All of these systems were integrated in and controlled by MarmoView. Stimuli were generated using MarmoView, custom code based on the PLDAPS (Eastman and Huk, 2012) system using Psychophysics Toolbox (Brainard, 1997) in MATLAB (MathWorks). For the electrophysiology data gathered from the N-Form arrays, neural responses were recorded using two Intan C3324 headstages attached to the array connectors which sent output to an Open Ephys acquisition board and GUI on a dedicated computer. In electrophysiology data gathered using Neuropixels probes, data was sent through Neuropixels headstages to a Neuropixels PXIe acquisition card within a PXIe chassis (National Instruments). The PXIe chassis sent outputs to a dedicated computer running Open Ephys with an Open Ephys acquisition board additionally attached to record timing events sent from the Datapixx I/O box. Spike sorting on data acquired using N-Form arrays was performed using in-house code to track and merge data from identified single units across multiple recording sessions (Muthmann et al., 2021). Spike sorting for data acquired using Neuropixels probes was performed using Kilosort 2.5.