Practising orientation identification improves orientation coding
in V1 neurons
Aniek Schoups, Rufin Vogels, Ning Qian, and Guy Orban,
Nature 2001, 412:549-553.
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Abstract
The adult brain shows remarkable plasticity, as demonstrated by the
improvement in fine sensorial discriminations after intensive
practice. The behavioural aspects of such perceptual learning are well
documented, especially in the visual system. Specificity for stimulus
attributes clearly implicates an early cortical site, where receptive
fields retain fine selectivity for these attributes; however, the
neuronal correlates of a simple visual discrimination task remained
unidentified. Here we report electrophysiological correlates in the
primary visual cortex (V1) of monkeys for learning orientation
identification. We link the behavioural improvement in this type of
learning to an improved neuronal performance of trained compared to
naive neurons. Improved long-term neuronal performance resulted from
changes in the characteristics of orientation tuning of individual
neurons. More particularly, the slope of the orientation tuning curve
that was measured at the trained orientation increased only for the
subgroup of trained neurons most likely to code the orientation
identified by the monkey. No modifications of the tuning curve were
observed for orientations for which the monkey had not been
trained. Thus training induces a specific and efficient increase in
neuronal sensitivity in V1.
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