RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 A power law of cortical adaptation
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2023.05.22.541834
DO 10.1101/2023.05.22.541834
A1 Tring, Elaine
A1 Dipoppa, Mario
A1 Ringach, Dario L.
YR 2023
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2023/05/22/2023.05.22.541834.abstract
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.