Topic: dendritic spine orientation tuning

Synaptic inputs onto single cortical neurons exhibit substantial diversity in their sensory-driven activity. What this diversity reflects is unclear, and appears counter-productive in generating selective somatic responses to specific stimuli. We propose that synaptic diversity supports computations that most effectively use information from upstream populations. To test this idea, we directly compare in silico synaptic weights for probabilistic decoder with in vivo synaptic input measurements. We define a decoder for a single sensory variable, orientation, that reads out the stimulus orientat