RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Dynamical processing of orientation precision in the primary visual cortex JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2021.03.30.437692 DO 10.1101/2021.03.30.437692 A1 Ladret, Hugo J. A1 Cortes, Nelson A1 Ikan, Lamyae A1 Chavane, Frédéric A1 Casanova, Christian A1 Perrinet, Laurent U. YR 2021 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/28/2021.03.30.437692.abstract 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.