Abstract
Sensory neurons are often reported to adjust their coding accuracy to the stimulus statistics. The observed match is not always perfect and the maximal accuracy does not align with the most frequent stimuli. As an alternative to a physiological explanation we show that the match critically depends on the chosen stimulus measurement scale. More generally, we argue that if we measure the stimulus intensity on the scale which is proportional to the perception intensity, an improved adjustment in the coding accuracy is revealed. The unique feature of stimulus units based on the psychophysical scale is that the coding accuracy can be meaningfully compared for different stimuli intensities, unlike in the standard case of a metric scale.
Highlights
Sensory neurons are often reported to adjust their coding accuracy to the stimulus statistics
The coding accuracy should increase near the most commonly occurring stimuli in order to minimize the overall decoding error and to maintain the efficient representation of the environment. Such situation is reported in the auditory coding of the sound intensity[5,6,9,10], of the interaural level differences[11] and time differences[12], and in the neural coding in the primary visual cortex[7] and primary somatosensory cortex[13]
The coding accuracy is commonly evaluated by means of the stimulus-reconstruction paradigm[14], that is, by answering how well may the ideal observer determine the stimulus value from the noisy neuronal response
Summary
Sensory neurons are often reported to adjust their coding accuracy to the stimulus statistics. The coding accuracy should increase near the most commonly occurring stimuli in order to minimize the overall decoding error and to maintain the efficient representation of the environment. Such situation is reported in the auditory coding of the sound intensity[5,6,9,10], of the interaural level differences[11] and time differences[12], and in the neural coding in the primary visual cortex[7] and primary somatosensory cortex[13]. We employ the classical Riesz’s psychophysical scale for the sound intensity[26] to reveal the expected coding accuracy adaptation even for low pressure levels in the experimental data of Watkins and Barbour[9]
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