Topic: feedforward synaptic weights

Animals naturally display a wide range of behaviours in varying contexts. Not only do their actions depend on their internal states, but also how their early sensory cortex processes information. Here, we propose that contextual top-down afferents adapt the receptive fields of sensory neurons to accommodate varying task demands. Although this view is widely supported by connectomic and electrophysiological evidence, a mechanistic and, in particular, a normative understanding is still lacking. We investigate how task-dependent top-down signals can reshape the functional mapping of sensory proce