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- Title
Supranormal orientation selectivity of visual neurons in orientation-restricted animals.
- Authors
Sasaki, Kota S.; Inagaki, Mikio; Nishimoto, Shinji; Tani, Toshiki; Imamura, Kazuyuki; Tanaka, Shigeru; Ohzawa, Izumi; Kimura, Rui; Ninomiya, Taihei; Tabuchi, Yuka; Fukui, Masayuki; Asada, Yusuke C.; Arai, Toshiya; Nakazono, Takayuki; Baba, Mika; Kato, Daisuke; Tanaka, Hiroki; Sanada, Takahisa M.
- Abstract
Altered sensory experience in early life often leads to remarkable adaptations so that humans and animals can make the best use of the available information in a particular environment. By restricting visual input to a limited range of orientations in young animals, this investigation shows that stimulus selectivity, e.g., the sharpness of tuning of single neurons in the primary visual cortex, is modified to match a particular environment. Specifically, neurons tuned to an experienced orientation in orientation-restricted animals show sharper orientation tuning than neurons in normal animals, whereas the opposite was true for neurons tuned to non-experienced orientations. This sharpened tuning appears to be due to elongated receptive fields. Our results demonstrate that restricted sensory experiences can sculpt the supranormal functions of single neurons tailored for a particular environment. The above findings, in addition to the minimal population response to orientations close to the experienced one, agree with the predictions of a sparse coding hypothesis in which information is represented efficiently by a small number of activated neurons. This suggests that early brain areas adopt an efficient strategy for coding information even when animals are raised in a severely limited visual environment where sensory inputs have an unnatural statistical structure.
- Subjects
ANIMAL cognition; MENTAL orientation; SENSORY stimulation; NEURON development; SENSORY neurons; VISUAL cortex; TUKEY'S test
- Publication
Scientific Reports, 2015, p16712
- ISSN
2045-2322
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/srep16712