Efficient processing of incoming sensory input is essential for an organism's survival. A growing body of evidence suggests that sensory systems have developed coding strategies that are constrained by the statistics of the natural environment. Consequently, it is necessary to first characterize neural responses to natural stimuli to uncover the coding strategies used by a given sensory system. Here we report for the first time the statistics of vestibular rotational and translational stimuli experienced by rhesus monkeys during natural (e.g., walking, grooming) behaviors. We find that these stimuli can reach intensities as high as 1500 deg/s and 8 G. Recordings from afferents during naturalistic rotational and linear motion further revealed strongly nonlinear responses in the form of rectification and saturation, which could not be accurately predicted by traditional linear models of vestibular processing. Accordingly, we used linear-nonlinear cascade models and found that these could accurately predict responses to naturalistic stimuli. Finally, we tested whether the statistics of natural vestibular signals constrain the neural coding strategies used by peripheral afferents. We found that both irregular otolith and semicircular canal afferents, because of their higher sensitivities, were more optimized for processing natural vestibular stimuli as compared with their regular counterparts. Our results therefore provide the first evidence supporting the hypothesis that the neural coding strategies used by the vestibular system are matched to the statistics of natural stimuli.

Early vestibular processing in macaque monkeys is inherently nonlinear and is optimized to detect specific features of self-motion.

Previous studies have shown that neurons within the vestibular nuclei (VN) can faithfully encode the time course of sensory input through changes in firing rate in vivo. However, studies performed in vitro have shown that these same VN neurons often display nonlinear synchronization (i.e. phase locking) in their spiking activity to the local maxima of sensory input, thereby severely limiting their capacity for faithful encoding of said input through changes in firing rate. We investigated this apparent discrepancy by studying the effects of in vivo conditions on VN neuron activity in vitro using a simple, physiologically based, model of cellular dynamics. We found that membrane potential oscillations were evoked both in response to step and zap current injection for a wide range of channel conductance values. These oscillations gave rise to a resonance in the spiking activity that causes synchronization to sinusoidal current injection at frequencies below 25 Hz. We hypothesized that the apparent discrepancy between VN response dynamics measured in in vitro conditions (i.e., consistent with our modeling results) and the dynamics measured in vivo conditions could be explained by an increase in trial-to-trial variability under in vivo vs. in vitro conditions. Accordingly, we mimicked more physiologically realistic conditions in our model by introducing a noise current to match the levels of resting discharge variability seen in vivo as quantified by the coefficient of variation (CV). While low noise intensities corresponding to CV values in the range 0.04–0.24 only eliminated synchronization for low (<8 Hz) frequency stimulation but not high (>12 Hz) frequency stimulation, higher noise intensities corresponding to CV values in the range 0.5–0.7 almost completely eliminated synchronization for all frequencies. Our results thus predict that, under natural (i.e. in vivo) conditions, the vestibular system uses increased variability to promote fidelity of encoding by single neurons. This prediction can be tested experimentally in vitro.

In vitro studies have previously found a class of vestibular nuclei neurons to exhibit a bidirectional afterhyperpolarization (AHP) in their membrane potential, due to calcium and calcium-activated potassium conductances. More recently in vivo studies of such vestibular neurons were found to exhibit a boosting nonlinearity in their input-output tuning curves. In this paper, a Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) type neuron model, originally developed to reproduce the in vitro AHP, is shown to produce a boosting nonlinearity similar to that seen in vivo for increased the calcium conductance. Indicative of a bifurcation, the HH model is reduced to a generalized integrate-and-fire (IF) model that preserves the bifurcation structure and boosting nonliearity. By then projecting the neuron model’s phase space trajectories into 2D, the underlying geometric mechanism relating the AHP and boosting nonlinearity is revealed. Further simplifications and approximations are made to derive analytic expressions for the steady steady state firing rate as a function of bias current, μ, as well as the gain (i.e. its slope) and the position of its peak at μ = μ*. Finally, although the boosting nonlinearity has not yet been experimentally observed in vitro, testable predictions indicate how it might be found.