Intrinsic dynamics enhance temporal stability of stimulus representation along rodent visual cortical hierarchies

Abstract

Along the ventral stream, cortical representations of brief, static stimuli become gradually more invariant to identity-preserving transformations. In the presence of long, ethologically relevant dynamic stimuli, higher invariance should imply temporally persistent representations at the top of this functional hierarchy. However, such stimuli could engage adaptive and predictive processes, whose impact on neural coding dynamics is unknown. More generally, coding dynamics in the presence of temporally structured stimuli are not understood. By probing the rodent analogue of the ventral stream with movies, we uncovered a hierarchy of temporal scales along this pathway, with deeper areas encoding visual information more persistently. Furthermore, the impact of intrinsic dynamics on the stability of stimulus representations gradually grows along the hierarchy. These results suggest that feedforward computations in the cortical hierarchy build up invariance even for dynamic, temporally structured stimuli, and that intrinsic processing contributes to the stabilization of representations in noisy, changing environments.

Temporal stability of stimulus representation increases along rodent visual cortical hierarchies

“…The data generated in this study have been deposited on OSF under accession code doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/7GTEQ 91 . The Allen data used in this study are available online, as documented in 12 .…”

“…The code associated to the analyses presented in this study is freely available at 91 (https:// doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7GTEQ).…”

A machine learning framework to optimize optic nerve electrical stimulation for vision restoration

“…However, animal vision is not simply high-bandwidth image classification; thus, the next step in this direction is to employ a sensory stream model that naturally encompasses time. 24 …”

“…General significance of dynamic landscape settings Gradual variation simulates the slight variations occurring when looking at a homogeneous dynamic scene. 24 Abrupt variation simulates sudden changes in a visual scene. 25,26 We hypothesize that physiological vision can be seen as a flow of gradual variations interrupted by point-like abrupt variations.…”