TY - JOUR T1 - High precision coding in mouse visual cortex JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/679324 SP - 679324 AU - Carsen Stringer AU - Michalis Michaelos AU - Marius Pachitariu Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/21/679324.abstract N2 - Single neurons in visual cortex provide unreliable measurements of visual features due to their high trial-to-trial variability. It is not known if this “noise” extends its effects over large neural populations to impair the global encoding of sensory stimuli. We recorded simultaneously from ∼20,000 neurons in mouse visual cortex and found that the neural population had discrimination thresholds of 0.3° in an orientation decoding task. These thresholds are ∼100 times smaller than those reported behaviorally in mice. The discrepancy between neural and behavioral discrimination could not be explained by the types of stimuli we used, by behavioral states or by the sequential nature of trial-by-trial perceptual learning tasks. These results imply that the limits of sensory perception in mice are not set by neural noise in sensory cortex, but by the limitations of downstream decoders. ER -