Topic: discrimination thresholds

Our visual system continually adapts to its sensory environment. As a result, both the encoding accuracy of sensory information and perceptual behavior change according to the recent history of sensory input. Here we tested the hypothesis that adaptation to the recent history of sensory input optimally prepares the perceptual system for the future, i.e. establishes efficient sensory representations for the next expected sensory input. We first quantitatively characterized the changes in neural encoding accuracy induced by adaptation with a psychophysical discrimination experiment. We measu

Single neurons in visual cortex provide unreliable measurements of visual features due to their high trial-to-trial variability. It is not known if this “noise” extends its effects over large neural populations to impair the global encoding of stimuli. We recorded simultaneously from ∼20,000 neurons in mouse primary visual cortex (V1) and found that the neural populations had discrimination thresholds of ∼0.34° in an orientation decoding task. These thresholds were nearly 100 times smaller than those reported behaviourally in mice. The discrepancy between neural and behavioural discrimination