Felsen Gidon, Dan Yang
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2005 Dec;8(12):1643-6. doi: 10.1038/nn1608.
An ultimate goal of systems neuroscience is to understand how sensory stimuli encountered in the natural environment are processed by neural circuits. Achieving this goal requires knowledge of both the characteristics of natural stimuli and the response properties of sensory neurons under natural stimulation. Most of our current notions of sensory processing have come from experiments using simple, parametric stimulus sets. However, a growing number of researchers have begun to question whether this approach alone is sufficient for understanding the real-life sensory tasks performed by the organism. Here, focusing on the early visual pathway, we argue that the use of natural stimuli is vital for advancing our understanding of sensory processing.
系统神经科学的一个终极目标是了解神经回路如何处理在自然环境中遇到的感觉刺激。要实现这一目标，需要了解自然刺激的特征以及自然刺激下感觉神经元的反应特性。我们目前对感觉处理的大多数概念都来自使用简单参数化刺激集的实验。然而，越来越多的研究人员开始质疑，仅靠这种方法是否足以理解生物体执行的现实生活中的感觉任务。在这里，我们聚焦于早期视觉通路，认为使用自然刺激对于推进我们对感觉处理的理解至关重要。
