Neuron
Volume 81, Issue 5, 5 March 2014, Pages 1152-1164
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Article
The Adaptive Trade-Off between Detection and Discrimination in Cortical Representations and Behavior

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.01.025Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Observer analysis of cortical activation suggests enhanced acuity with adaptation

  • Adaptation significantly enhanced spatial discriminability during behavior

  • Thalamic spiking in the awake animals exhibited adaptation that mirrors behavior

  • Modeling implicates thalamic firing rate and timing in the adaptive trade-off

Summary

It has long been posited that detectability of sensory inputs can be sacrificed in favor of improved discriminability and that sensory adaptation may mediate this trade-off. The extent to which this trade-off exists behaviorally and the complete picture of the underlying neural representations that likely subserve the phenomenon remain unclear. In the rodent vibrissa system, an ideal observer analysis of cortical activity measured using voltage-sensitive dye imaging in anesthetized animals was combined with behavioral detection and discrimination tasks, thalamic recordings from awake animals, and computational modeling to show that spatial discrimination performance was improved following adaptation, but at the expense of the ability to detect weak stimuli. Together, these results provide direct behavioral evidence for the trade-off between detectability and discriminability, that this trade-off can be modulated through bottom-up sensory adaptation, and that these effects correspond to important changes in thalamocortical coding properties.

Cited by (0)

2

Present address: Allen Institute for Brain Science, 551 North 34th Street #200, Seattle, WA 98103, USA

3

Present address: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, 351 Engineering Terrace, 1210 Amsterdam, Avenue, New York, NY 10027, USA

4

These authors contributed equally to this work