PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Ladret, Hugo J. AU - Cortes, Nelson AU - Ikan, Lamyae AU - Chavane, Frédéric AU - Casanova, Christian AU - Perrinet, Laurent U. TI - Dynamical processing of orientation precision in the primary visual cortex AID - 10.1101/2021.03.30.437692 DP - 2021 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 2021.03.30.437692 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/28/2021.03.30.437692.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/28/2021.03.30.437692.full AB - 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.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.