TY - JOUR
T1 - Sensory Adaptation in the Whisker-Mediated Tactile System
T2 - Physiology, Theory, and Function
AU - Adibi, Mehdi
AU - Lampl, Ilan
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by the University of Padua under the 2019 STARS Grants programme (CONTEXT, Context matters: from sensory processing to decision making) to MA. MA was supported by an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship (DE200101468) and CJ Martin Early Career Fellowship (GNT1110421) from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). IL was supported by DFG (SFB 1089), Human Frontier Science Program Grant, Israel Science Foundation (ISF 1539/17), BSF Grant 2019251,
Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Mathew E. Diamond (International School for Advanced Studies - SISSA), Ramesh Rajan (Monash University) and Nelly Redolfi (University of Padua) for discussions and comments on the manuscript, and Garrett Stanley (Georgia Institute of Technology), Randy M. Bruno (Columbia University), Simon Musall (Forschungszentrum J?lich), and Florent Haiss (Institut Pasteur) for their support and providing materials used in Figures 8 ?10.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2021 Adibi and Lampl.
PY - 2021/10/29
Y1 - 2021/10/29
N2 - In the natural environment, organisms are constantly exposed to a continuous stream of sensory input. The dynamics of sensory input changes with organism's behaviour and environmental context. The contextual variations may induce >100-fold change in the parameters of the stimulation that an animal experiences. Thus, it is vital for the organism to adapt to the new diet of stimulation. The response properties of neurons, in turn, dynamically adjust to the prevailing properties of sensory stimulation, a process known as “neuronal adaptation.” Neuronal adaptation is a ubiquitous phenomenon across all sensory modalities and occurs at different stages of processing from periphery to cortex. In spite of the wealth of research on contextual modulation and neuronal adaptation in visual and auditory systems, the neuronal and computational basis of sensory adaptation in somatosensory system is less understood. Here, we summarise the recent finding and views about the neuronal adaptation in the rodent whisker-mediated tactile system and further summarise the functional effect of neuronal adaptation on the response dynamics and encoding efficiency of neurons at single cell and population levels along the whisker-mediated touch system in rodents. Based on direct and indirect pieces of evidence presented here, we suggest sensory adaptation provides context-dependent functional mechanisms for noise reduction in sensory processing, salience processing and deviant stimulus detection, shift between integration and coincidence detection, band-pass frequency filtering, adjusting neuronal receptive fields, enhancing neural coding and improving discriminability around adapting stimuli, energy conservation, and disambiguating encoding of principal features of tactile stimuli.
AB - In the natural environment, organisms are constantly exposed to a continuous stream of sensory input. The dynamics of sensory input changes with organism's behaviour and environmental context. The contextual variations may induce >100-fold change in the parameters of the stimulation that an animal experiences. Thus, it is vital for the organism to adapt to the new diet of stimulation. The response properties of neurons, in turn, dynamically adjust to the prevailing properties of sensory stimulation, a process known as “neuronal adaptation.” Neuronal adaptation is a ubiquitous phenomenon across all sensory modalities and occurs at different stages of processing from periphery to cortex. In spite of the wealth of research on contextual modulation and neuronal adaptation in visual and auditory systems, the neuronal and computational basis of sensory adaptation in somatosensory system is less understood. Here, we summarise the recent finding and views about the neuronal adaptation in the rodent whisker-mediated tactile system and further summarise the functional effect of neuronal adaptation on the response dynamics and encoding efficiency of neurons at single cell and population levels along the whisker-mediated touch system in rodents. Based on direct and indirect pieces of evidence presented here, we suggest sensory adaptation provides context-dependent functional mechanisms for noise reduction in sensory processing, salience processing and deviant stimulus detection, shift between integration and coincidence detection, band-pass frequency filtering, adjusting neuronal receptive fields, enhancing neural coding and improving discriminability around adapting stimuli, energy conservation, and disambiguating encoding of principal features of tactile stimuli.
KW - information theory
KW - neural coding
KW - neural network
KW - neuronal adaptation
KW - noise correlation
KW - rodent
KW - somatosensory
KW - whisker system
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85119048246&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3389/fnins.2021.770011
DO - 10.3389/fnins.2021.770011
M3 - Review Article
AN - SCOPUS:85119048246
SN - 1662-453X
VL - 15
JO - Frontiers in Neuroscience
JF - Frontiers in Neuroscience
M1 - 770011
ER -