PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Tring, Elaine
AU  - Dipoppa, Mario
AU  - Ringach, Dario L.
TI  - A power law of cortical adaptation
AID  - 10.1101/2023.05.22.541834
DP  - 2023 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2023.05.22.541834
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/05/22/2023.05.22.541834.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/05/22/2023.05.22.541834.full
AB  - How do neural populations adapt to the time-varying statistics of sensory input? To investigate, we measured the activity of neurons in primary visual cortex adapted to different environments, each associated with a distinct probability distribution over a stimulus set. Within each environment, a stimulus sequence was generated by independently sampling form its distribution. We find that two properties of adaptation capture how the population responses to a given stimulus, viewed as vectors, are linked across environments. First, the ratio between the response magnitudes is a power law of the ratio between the stimulus probabilities. Second, the response directions are largely invariant. These rules can be used to predict how cortical populations adapt to novel, sensory environments. Finally, we show how the power law enables the cortex to preferentially signal unexpected stimuli and to adjust the metabolic cost of its sensory representation to the entropy of the environment.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.