title: Sensory adaptation and short term plasticity as Bayesian correction for a changing brain.
abstract: Neurons in the sensory system exhibit changes in excitability that unfold over many time scales. These fluctuations produce noise and could potentially lead to perceptual errors. However, to prevent such errors, postsynaptic neurons and synapses can adapt and counteract changes in the excitability of presynaptic neurons. Here we ask how neurons could optimally adapt to minimize the influence of changing presynaptic neural properties on their outputs. The resulting model, based on Bayesian inference, explains a range of physiological results from experiments which have measured the overall properties and detailed time-course of sensory tuning curve adaptation in the early visual cortex. We show how several experimentally measured short term plasticity phenomena can be understood as near-optimal solutions to this adaptation problem. This framework provides a link between high level computational problems, the properties of cortical neurons, and synaptic physiology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physiology, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA. i-stevenson@northwestern.edu
authors.forename: Ian H
authors.initials: IH
authors.lastname: Stevenson
authors.forename: Beau
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Cronin
authors.forename: Mriganka
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sur
authors.forename: Konrad P
authors.initials: KP
authors.lastname: Kording
mesh_terms: D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity; D011984:Sensory Receptor Cells / Q000502:physiology*; D013569:Synapses / Q000502:physiology; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology