Neuronal variability and tuning are balanced to optimize naturalistic self-motion coding in primate vestibular pathways
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is commonly assumed that the brain's neural coding strategies are adapted to the statistics of natural stimuli. Specifically, to maximize information transmission, a sensory neuron's tuning function should effectively oppose the decaying stimulus spectral power, such that the neural response is temporally decorrelated (i.e. 'whitened'). However, theory predicts that the structure of neuronal variability also plays an essential role in determining how coding is optimized. Here, we provide experimental evidence supporting this view by recording from neurons in early vestibular pathways during naturalistic self-motion. We found that central vestibular neurons displayed temporally whitened responses that could not be explained by their tuning alone. Rather, computational modeling and analysis revealed that neuronal variability and tuning were matched to effectively complement natural stimulus statistics, thereby achieving temporal decorrelation and optimizing information transmission. Taken together, our findings reveal a novel strategy by which neural variability contributes to optimized processing of naturalistic stimuli.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".