Topic: stimulus history

Sensory neurons in different species, brain areas, and modalities adjust their sensitivity (gain) in response to recent stimulus history. This gain control offers a mechanism for single neurons to rapidly and reversibly adapt to different stimulus contexts while preserving synaptic weights that serve to represent features that remain consistent across contexts. From a normative perspective, this allows an individual neuron to adjust the dynamic range of its responses to accommodate changes in input statistics -- a core tenet of Barlow's efficient coding theory. However, experimental measureme

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