Affiliation:
1. Department of Physiology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Abstract
Growing evidence suggests that sensory neurons achieve optimal encoding by matching their tuning properties to the natural stimulus statistics. However, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here we demonstrate that feedback pathways from higher brain areas mediate optimized encoding of naturalistic stimuli via temporal whitening in the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus. While one source of direct feedback uniformly enhances neural responses, a separate source of indirect feedback selectively attenuates responses to low frequencies, thus creating a high-pass neural tuning curve that opposes the decaying spectral power of natural stimuli. Additionally, we recorded from two populations of higher brain neurons responsible for the direct and indirect descending inputs. While one population displayed broadband tuning, the other displayed high-pass tuning and thus performed temporal whitening. Hence, our results demonstrate a novel function for descending input in optimizing neural responses to sensory input through temporal whitening that is likely to be conserved across systems and species.
Funder
Canadian Institutes of Health Research
Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologies
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Subject
General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine,General Neuroscience
Cited by
28 articles.
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