Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ollerenshaw, Douglas R.
• Zheng, He J.V.
• Millard, Daniel C.
• Wang, Qi
• Stanley, Garrett B.

Titel

The Adaptive Trade-Off between Detection and Discrimination in Cortical Representations and Behavior

Ist Teil von

• Neuron (Cambridge, Mass.), 2014-03, Vol.81 (5), p.1152-1164

Ort / Verlag

United States: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It has long been posited that detectability of sensory inputs can be sacrificed in favor of improved discriminability and that sensory adaptation may mediate this trade-off. The extent to which this trade-off exists behaviorally and the complete picture of the underlying neural representations that likely subserve the phenomenon remain unclear. In the rodent vibrissa system, an ideal observer analysis of cortical activity measured using voltage-sensitive dye imaging in anesthetized animals was combined with behavioral detection and discrimination tasks, thalamic recordings from awake animals, and computational modeling to show that spatial discrimination performance was improved following adaptation, but at the expense of the ability to detect weak stimuli. Together, these results provide direct behavioral evidence for the trade-off between detectability and discriminability, that this trade-off can be modulated through bottom-up sensory adaptation, and that these effects correspond to important changes in thalamocortical coding properties. •Observer analysis of cortical activation suggests enhanced acuity with adaptation•Adaptation significantly enhanced spatial discriminability during behavior•Thalamic spiking in the awake animals exhibited adaptation that mirrors behavior•Modeling implicates thalamic firing rate and timing in the adaptive trade-off Using cortical imaging, behavior, and computational modeling, Ollerenshaw et al. show that sensory adaptation modulates a trade-off between detectability and discriminability of inputs to the rodent vibrissa system and suggest a dynamic role for thalamic gating of cortical information flow.