Topic: response properties

To successfully inform behavior, cortical circuits must produce consistent patterns of neuronal activity within and across trials that allow for reliable stimulus discrimination. Under this perspective, any response variability appears detrimental to sensory systems as it severely limits stimulus discriminability. Here, we propose a beneficial role of response variability: to facilitate faster learning in feedforward-recurrent networks through a self-stabilizing feedback mechanism. We explore this hypothesis in the framework of learning novel stimulus representations in pre-structured recurren