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Adaptation of the simple or complex nature of V1 receptive fields to visual statistics

Abstract

Receptive fields in primary visual cortex (V1) are categorized as simple or complex, depending on their spatial selectivity to stimulus contrast polarity. We studied the dependence of this classification on visual context by comparing, in the same cell, the synaptic responses to three classical receptive field mapping protocols: sparse noise, ternary dense noise and flashed Gabor noise. Intracellular recordings revealed that the relative weights of simple-like and complex-like receptive field components were scaled so as to make the same receptive field more simple-like with dense noise stimulation and more complex-like with sparse or Gabor noise stimulations. However, once these context-dependent receptive fields were convolved with the corresponding stimulus, the balance between simple-like and complex-like contributions to the synaptic responses appeared to be invariant across input statistics. This normalization of the linear/nonlinear input ratio suggests a previously unknown form of homeostatic control of V1 functional properties, optimizing the network nonlinearities to the statistical structure of the visual input.

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Figure 1: White-noise stimuli and second-order Volterra receptive field decomposition.
Figure 2: Stimulus dependence of simple-like and complex-like receptive field components.
Figure 3: Receptive field Simpleness and gain control of simple-like and complex-like receptive field components.
Figure 4: Spatiotemporal reconfiguration of simple-like and complex-like receptive field components.
Figure 5: V1 receptive field simpleness adapts to visual statistics.
Figure 6: Simpleness in non-adaptive receptive field models.
Figure 7: Simpleness in gain control receptive field models.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to G. Sadoc for his invaluable technical assistance in developing the stimulation software and kernel analysis library tools. We thank A. Davison for comments and suggestions on the manuscript. We are thankful to Z. Kisvarday and K. Sari for their help in the biocytin labeling protocol. We acknowledge the financial support of CNRS, the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (Natstats and V1-Complex), European community contracts Facets (FP6-2004-IST-FETPI 15879) and Brain-i-nets (FP7-2009-ICT-FET 243914).

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Contributions

The study was conceived by J.F., C.M. and Y.F. The experiments were performed by J.F., C.M. and M.P. J.F. performed the data analysis and model simulations. J.F., C.M. and Y.F. wrote the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Julien Fournier or Yves Frégnac.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Fournier, J., Monier, C., Pananceau, M. et al. Adaptation of the simple or complex nature of V1 receptive fields to visual statistics. Nat Neurosci 14, 1053–1060 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2861

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