Topic: Feature selectivity

Natural visual environments are full of complex and diverse patterns. Recent neurophysiological experiments based on artificial patterns have suggested that macaque V1 neurons’ receptive fields are more complex and diverse in feature selectivity (Tang et al 2017) rather than just oriented Gabor filters. However, that finding was based on extensive parametric artificial stimuli used and might be biased. Hence, the nature of the neural codes of macaque V1 neurons remains controversial. To resolve this question, we performed 2-photon calcium imaging on three macaque monkeys to obtain 1689 V1 neur

Cortical excitatory (E) neurons exhibit clear tuning to stimulus features, but the tuning properties of inhibitory interneurons remain ambiguous. While inhibitory neurons are traditionally viewed as functionally and structurally untuned [1-4], recent studies indicate that parvalbumin-expressing (PV) neurons do show feature selectivity and establish co-tuned reciprocal connections with individual pyramidal neurons at a pairwise level [5-7]. Using mean-field theory and large-scale network simulations of spiking cells (Fig. 1A), we reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings by demonstrating

Adaptation is ubiquitous in sensory systems. Sensory neurons change their activity depending on the past stimulus history, which they integrate at various timescales. Short- and long-term adaptations have been mostly studied using simple, artificial stimuli, but rarely with natural scenes. Even at the level of the retina, it is unclear how these adaptive processes impact ganglion cells, the retinal output, and how they change their feature selectivity to natural scenes as a function of the recent stimulus history. This raises a major challenge for our understanding of how ganglion cells proce