In the unbiased condition, the model correctly predicted the diagonal CX-5461 mouse structure of the V1 matrix (Figure 4D). In the biased condition, more importantly, the model fitted both the repulsion of tuning curves and the shape of the gain change that we observed in V1 (Figure 4E). As we have seen (Figures 2K and 2L), these predictions
are accurate even though no model parameters were allowed to vary across adaptation conditions. We could therefore replicate the strikingly different effects of adaptation in LGN and V1 by assuming that V1 is completely blind to spatial adaptation and inherits its effects entirely from the population responses of LGN. Our results illustrate how adaptation can cause changes that are straightforward in one brain region and then cascade onto the next brain region to produce changes that are more complex and profound. Specifically, we found that spatial adaptation has NLG919 research buy markedly different effects in LGN and V1: in LGN, it only changes response gain, but in V1, it also changes stimulus selectivity. We explained these disparate effects by using a summation model with fixed weights. According to this model, spatial adaptation cascades onto V1, shaping the tuning of its neurons without affecting their summation of LGN inputs. Our results are in general agreement with previous studies of cascading adaptation measured physiologically (Kohn and Movshon, 2003 and Kohn and
Movshon, 2004). These studies compared adaptation to motion in primate areas V1 and MT and found that it changed the tuning curves in area MT but not in area V1. The
authors suggested that a cascade model similar to ours could Farnesyltransferase account for the observed effects, i.e., that MT neurons could inherit their adaptation properties from adaptation in their inputs. More recent work indicates that adaptation can change fundamental attributes of how MT neurons integrate motion patterns, and yet that these changes can be entirely inherited from gain changes occurring in area V1 (Patterson et al., 2014). In fact, the model we used for how V1 neurons process LGN inputs resembles a widely accepted model for how MT neurons process V1 inputs: a weighted sum followed by a normalization stage and a static nonlinearity (Rust et al., 2006). However, our results do not mean that each stage of the visual system merely inherits adaptation from its inputs. Different stages can add adaptation to specific features to which they are sensitive. For instance, since LGN neurons of cats and primates are not selective for stimulus orientation, they could not be responsible for the powerful effects of adaptation seen in V1 in the orientation domain (Benucci et al., 2013 and Kohn, 2007). These results will help interpret the effects of neural adaptation that are routinely measured in electrophysiology and in a multitude of fMRI measurements.