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Coarse-to-fine processing drives the efficient coding of natural scenes in mouse visual cortex

Cell Rep. 2022 Mar 29;38(13):110606. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2022.110606.

ABSTRACT

The visual system processes sensory inputs sequentially, perceiving coarse information before fine details. Here we study the neural basis of coarse-to-fine processing and its computational benefits in natural vision. We find that primary visual cortical neurons in awake mice respond to natural scenes in a coarse-to-fine manner, primarily driven by individual neurons rapidly shifting their spatial frequency preference from low to high over a brief response period. This shift transforms the population response in a way that counteracts the statistical regularities of natural scenes, thereby reducing redundancy and generating a more efficient neural representation. The increase in representational efficiency does not occur in either dark-reared or anesthetized mice, which show significantly attenuated coarse-to-fine spatial processing. Collectively, these results illustrate that coarse-to-fine processing is state dependent, develops postnatally via visual experience, and provides a computational advantage by generating more efficient representations of the complex spatial statistics of ethologically relevant natural scenes.

PMID:35354030 | DOI:10.1016/j.celrep.2022.110606

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