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The neural basis for violations of Weber's law in self-motion perception.
Carriot, Jerome; Cullen, Kathleen E; Chacron, Maurice J.
Afiliación
  • Carriot J; Department of Physiology, McGill University, Montréal, QC H3G 1Y6, Canada.
  • Cullen KE; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218.
  • Chacron MJ; Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A ; 118(36)2021 09 07.
Article en En | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-34475203
A prevailing view is that Weber's law constitutes a fundamental principle of perception. This widely accepted psychophysical law states that the minimal change in a given stimulus that can be perceived increases proportionally with amplitude and has been observed across systems and species in hundreds of studies. Importantly, however, Weber's law is actually an oversimplification. Notably, there exist violations of Weber's law that have been consistently observed across sensory modalities. Specifically, perceptual performance is better than that predicted from Weber's law for the higher stimulus amplitudes commonly found in natural sensory stimuli. To date, the neural mechanisms mediating such violations of Weber's law in the form of improved perceptual performance remain unknown. Here, we recorded from vestibular thalamocortical neurons in rhesus monkeys during self-motion stimulation. Strikingly, we found that neural discrimination thresholds initially increased but saturated for higher stimulus amplitudes, thereby causing the improved neural discrimination performance required to explain perception. Theory predicts that stimulus-dependent neural variability and/or response nonlinearities will determine discrimination threshold values. Using computational methods, we thus investigated the mechanisms mediating this improved performance. We found that the structure of neural variability, which initially increased but saturated for higher amplitudes, caused improved discrimination performance rather than response nonlinearities. Taken together, our results reveal the neural basis for violations of Weber's law and further provide insight as to how variability contributes to the adaptive encoding of natural stimuli with continually varying statistics.
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Texto completo: 1 Colección: 01-internacional Banco de datos: MEDLINE Asunto principal: Células Receptoras Sensoriales / Percepción de Movimiento Límite: Animals Idioma: En Revista: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Año: 2021 Tipo del documento: Article País de afiliación: Canadá

Texto completo: 1 Colección: 01-internacional Banco de datos: MEDLINE Asunto principal: Células Receptoras Sensoriales / Percepción de Movimiento Límite: Animals Idioma: En Revista: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Año: 2021 Tipo del documento: Article País de afiliación: Canadá