The primary visual cortex (V1) processes complex mixtures of orientations to build neural representations of our visual environment. It remains unclear how V1 adapts to the highly volatile distributions of orientations found in natural images. We used naturalistic stimuli and measured the response of V1 neurons to orientation distributions of varying bandwidth. Although broad distributions decreased single neuron tuning, a neurally plausible decoder could robustly retrieve the orientations of stimuli from the population activity at all bandwidths. This decoder demonstrates that V1 population co-encodes orientation and its precision, which enhances population decoding performances. This internal representation is mediated by temporally distinct neural dynamics and supports a precision-weighted description of neuronal message passing in the visual cortex.
now (2:00 PM - 3:00 PM CEST on Thursday, May 20), you can hear Hugo Ladret @univamu present his poster P4.47 "Processing of orientation precision in the primary visual cortex"https://t.co/vuT6gegwtO
— @laurentperrinet@neuromatch.social (@laurentperrinet) May 20, 2021
Neurofrance 2021 #NF2021 #NeuroFrance2021 @SocNeuro_Tweets pic.twitter.com/YQNF9FiB6m
preprint of a former revision: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.30.437692v5
This neurophysiological work accompanies a similar study in theoretical neuroscience :