Neurology Commons^™

Optimality In Neural Adaptation, Adrienne Fairhall

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Nervous systems tune themselves to the statistical structure of the stimuli they encounter. This sensitivity to statistics appears in phenomena ranging over many timescales, from the adaptation of vision to a rapid change in light level to the loss of ability to distinguish the sounds of non-native languages. While multiple neural mechanisms contribute to this on-line learning of stimulus distributions, we show that the intrinsic nonlinearities of single neurons provide them with the ability to represent time-varying stimuli optimally. While such sensitivity to stimulus statistics does not require learning, slower timescales of adaptation are consistent with optimal inference of statistical …