Abstract
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. Furthermore, we showed that V1 co-encodes orientation and its precision, which enhances population discriminatory performances. This internal representation is mediated by temporally distinct neural codes, supporting a precision-based description of the neuronal message passing in the visual cortex.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
