The retina maintains sensitivity over a large range of luminance intensities by switching between rod and cone photoreceptors. This luminance adaptation has been shown to alter the receptive fields and interneuronal correlations of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). While these adaptations allow the retina to encode visual information across environmental conditions, they present a challenge to downstream processing areas for which it is important that representations are invariant to light level. We measured the effects of scotopic versus photopic luminance adaptation on thalamic and cortical activity by tracking neuronal populations across light levels. While changes in the output of the retina are evident in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), the representation in primary visual cortex (V1) is largely invariant to the changes in luminance. We show that an invariant V1 code can emerge through the integration of parallel functional pathways at the geniculocortical synapse.

中文翻译：

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初级视觉皮层的亮度不变编码

视网膜通过在杆状光感受器和锥状光感受器之间切换来在大范围的亮度强度下保持敏感度。这种亮度适应已被证明可以改变视网膜神经节细胞（RGC）的感受野和神经元间相关性。虽然这些适应允许视网膜在不同环境条件下编码视觉信息，但它们对下游处理区域提出了挑战，对于下游处理区域来说，表征对于光水平不变是很重要的。我们通过跟踪不同光照水平的神经元群来测量暗视与明视亮度适应对丘脑和皮质活动的影响。虽然外侧膝状核 (LGN) 中视网膜输出的变化很明显，但初级视觉皮层 (V1) 中的表现在很大程度上不受亮度变化的影响。我们证明，通过膝皮质突触处并行功能通路的整合，可以出现不变的 V1 代码。