V1-Origin Bidirectional Plasticity in Visual Thalamo–Ventral Pathway and Its Contribution to Saliency Detection of Dynamic Visual Inputs

Abstract

Visual neural plasticity and V1 saliency detection are vital for efficient coding of dynamically changing visual inputs. However, how does neural plasticity contribute to saliency detection of temporal statistically distributed visual stream remains unclear. Therefore, we adopted randomly presented but unevenly distributed stimuli with multiple orientations and examined the single-unit responses evoked by this biased orientation-adaptation protocol by single-unit recordings in the visual thalamo-ventral pathway of cats (of either sex). We found neuronal responses potentiated when the probability of biased orientation was slightly higher than other nonbiased ones and suppressed when the probability became much higher. This single neuronal short-term bidirectional plasticity is selectively induced by optimal stimuli but is interocularly transferable. It is inducible in LGN, Area 17, and Area 21a with distinct and hierarchically progressive patterns. With the results of latency analysis, receptive field structural test, cortical lesion, and simulations, we suggest this bidirectional plasticity may principally originate from the adaptation competition between excitatory and inhibitory components of V1 neuronal receptive field. In our simulation, above bidirectional plasticity could achieve saliency detection of dynamic visual inputs. These findings demonstrate a rapid probability dependent plasticity on the neural coding of visual stream and suggest its functional role in the efficient coding and saliency detection of dynamic environment.

Detection of a temporal salient object benefits from visual stimulus‐specific adaptation in avian midbrain inhibitory nucleus

“…2021; Feng et al. 2022), the neuronal recordings in this study were conducted in male and female pigeons ( Columba livia , 350–450‐g body weight). The pigeons were housed in individual wire mesh cages under a 12:12‐h light–dark cycle with free access to water and food.…”

“…Given that sex differences in animals are rarely considered in researches that are conducted at the level of subcortical neurons (Ahmadlou et al 2018;Garrido-Charad et al 2018;Wohlgemuth et al 2018;Kloos et al 2019;Deichler et al 2020;Schryver et al 2020;Mahajan & Mysore 2022;Weigel et al 2022) and that most of the relevant papers on SSA do not pay attention to animal sex (Netser et al 2011;Dutta et al 2016;Wasmuht et al 2017;Valdés-Baizabal et al 2020;Lee et al 2020b;Jia et al 2021;Feng et al 2022), the neuronal recordings in this study were conducted in male and female pigeons (Columba livia, 350-450-g body weight). The pigeons were housed in individual wire mesh cages under a 12:12-h light-dark cycle with free access to water and food.…”