Rapid Sensory Adaptation Redux: A Circuit Perspective

Abstract

Summary Adaptation is fundamental to life. All organisms adapt over timescales that span from evolution to generations and lifetimes to moment-by-moment interactions. The nervous system is particularly adept at rapidly adapting to change, and this in fact may be one of its fundamental principles of organization and function. Rapid forms of sensory adaptation have been well-documented across all sensory modalities in a wide range of organisms, yet we do not have a comprehensive understanding of the adaptive cellular mechanisms that ultimately give rise to the corresponding percepts due in part to the complexity of the circuitry. In this Perspective, we aim to build links between adaptation at multiple scales of neural circuitry by investigating the differential adaptation across brain regions and sub-regions and across specific cell-types, for which the explosion of modern tools has just begun to enable. This investigation points to a set of challenges for the field to link functional observations to adaptive properties of the neural circuit that ultimately underlie percepts.

Broadband Dynamics Rather than Frequency-Specific Rhythms Underlie Prediction Error in the Primate Auditory Cortex

“…83 Detection of novel sensory information enables adaptive interaction with the surrounding environment 84 (Clark, 2013;Whitmire and Stanley, 2016). In the predictive coding framework of brain functioning, 85 this interaction is characterized by a reciprocal loop between sensory predictions and prediction error 86 signals (Bastos et al, 2012;Friston and Kiebel, 2009).…”

Neural Responses and Perceptual Sensitivity to Sound Depend on Sound-Level Statistics

“…The current data, together with recent magnetoencephalography data 21 , demonstrate response patterns that are consistent with adaptation to sound-level statistics in human auditory cortex. The mechanisms underlying statistical adaptation are not fully understood, but research in animals suggests that neural inhibition is likely an important contributor 4,17,[35][36][37][38] .…”

“…How does that person manage to hear effectively in all those different environments? Some perceptual flexibility is crucial for the optimization of perception and behavior [1][2][3][4] . However, neurons that support audition are limited in the range of sensory stimulation to which they respond 5,6 .…”

Incorporating neuronal fatigue in deep neural networks captures dynamics of adaptation in neurophysiology and perception

“…Likewise, in the brain neural responses change both during and after the presentation of a stimulus, resulting in complex temporal dynamics. The dependence of neural activity and perception on recent stimulation is generally called adaptation and is considered a fundamental property of our visual and other sensory systems (Whitmire and Stanley, 2016). Adaptation can improve metabolic efficiency by avoiding costly signal pro-cessing under conditions where the inputs are constant.…”

“…In addition, adaptation matches the system's sensitivity to the prevailing conditions of the sensory environment, improving novelty detection (Clifford et al, 2007;Kohn, 2007). Rapid calibration of the system's operations is particularly relevant for understanding biological vision because it relates to the moment-to-moment changes of natural visual input (Whitmire and Stanley, 2016). Our current best models of the primate ventral visual stream are based on a family of feedforward deep artificial neural networks (ANN) that assume a static stimulus-response relation.…”