Sensory adaptation mediates efficient and unambiguous encoding of natural stimuli by vestibular thalamocortical pathways

Jerome Carriot, Graham McAllister, Hamed Hooshangnejad, Isabelle Mackrous, Kathleen E. Cullen and Maurice J. Chacron ()
Additional contact information
Jerome Carriot: McGill University
Graham McAllister: McGill University
Hamed Hooshangnejad: Johns Hopkins University
Isabelle Mackrous: McGill University
Kathleen E. Cullen: Johns Hopkins University
Maurice J. Chacron: McGill University

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Abstract Sensory systems must continuously adapt to optimally encode stimuli encountered within the natural environment. The prevailing view is that such optimal coding comes at the cost of increased ambiguity, yet to date, prior studies have focused on artificial stimuli. Accordingly, here we investigated whether such a trade-off between optimality and ambiguity exists in the encoding of natural stimuli in the vestibular system. We recorded vestibular nuclei and their target vestibular thalamocortical neurons during naturalistic and artificial self-motion stimulation. Surprisingly, we found no trade-off between optimality and ambiguity. Using computational methods, we demonstrate that thalamocortical neural adaptation in the form of contrast gain control actually reduces coding ambiguity without compromising the optimality of coding under naturalistic but not artificial stimulation. Thus, taken together, our results challenge the common wisdom that adaptation leads to ambiguity and instead suggest an essential role in underlying unambiguous optimized encoding of natural stimuli.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30348-x Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-30348-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-30348-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().