Effects of stimulus transformations on estimates of sensory neuron selectivity

Stimulus selectivity of sensory systems is often characterized by analyzing responseconditioned stimulus ensembles. However, in many cases these response-triggered stimulus sets have structure that is more complex than assumed. If not taken into account, when present it will bias the estimates of many simple statistics, and distort the estimated stimulus selectivity of a neural sensory system. We present an approach that mitigates these problems by modeling some of the response-conditioned stimulus structure as being generated by a set of transformations acting on a simple stimulus distribution. This approach corrects the estimates of key statistics and counters biases introduced by the transformations. In cases involving temporal spike jitter or spatial jitter of images, the main observed effects of transformations are

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JCNS
• Authors: Alexander G. Dimitrov, Tomás Gedeon
• Keywords: JCNS 2006, Response-triggered Stimulus Sets, Sensory System, Stimulus Selectivity