Department of Functional Architecture and Development of Cerebral Cortex, Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, Jupiter, Florida, USA.
Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2015 Feb;18(2):252-61. doi: 10.1038/nn.3921. Epub 2015 Jan 19.
Stimulus discrimination depends on the selectivity and variability of neural responses, as well as the size and correlation structure of the responsive population. For direction discrimination in visual cortex, only the selectivity of neurons has been well characterized across development. Here we show in ferrets that at eye opening, the cortical response to visual stimulation exhibits several immaturities, including a high density of active neurons that display prominent wave-like activity, a high degree of variability and strong noise correlations. Over the next three weeks, the population response becomes increasingly sparse, wave-like activity disappears, and variability and noise correlations are markedly reduced. Similar changes were observed in identified neuronal populations imaged repeatedly over days. Furthermore, experience with a moving stimulus was capable of driving a reduction in noise correlations over a matter of hours. These changes in variability and correlation contribute significantly to a marked improvement in direction discriminability over development.
刺激辨别取决于神经反应的选择性和可变性，以及反应群体的大小和相关结构。对于视觉皮层中的方向辨别，只有神经元的选择性在整个发育过程中得到了很好的描述。在这里，我们在雪貂中表明，在睁眼时，视觉刺激的皮层反应表现出几种不成熟的现象，包括活跃神经元的高密度，显示出明显的波状活动，高度的可变性和强烈的噪声相关性。在接下来的三周内，群体反应变得越来越稀疏，波状活动消失，可变性和噪声相关性明显降低。在重复成像的多天中，在已识别的神经元群体中观察到了类似的变化。此外，经历移动刺激能够在几个小时内降低噪声相关性。这些可变性和相关性的变化对方向辨别能力在发育过程中的显著提高有重要贡献。
