Biomedical subjects

Garrett B Stanley

Publications and source records attributed to Garrett B Stanley.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

Adaptive encoding in the visual pathway.

In a natural setting, the mean luminance and contrast of the light within a visual neuron's receptive field are constantly changing as the eyes saccade across complex scenes. Adaptive mechanisms modulate filtering properties of the early visual pathway in response to these variations, allowing the system to maintain differential sensitivity to nonstationary stimuli. An adaptive variant of the reverse correlation technique is used to characterize these changes during single trials. Properties of the adaptive reverse correlation algorithm were investigated via simulation. Analysis of data collected from the mammalian visual system demonstrates the ability to continuously track adaptive changes in the encoding scheme. The adaptive estimation approach provides a framework for characterizing the role of adaptation in natural scene viewing.

Adaptation, Physiological↗

PubMed2002

Computational subunits of visual cortical neurons revealed by artificial neural networks.

A crucial step toward understanding visual processing is to obtain a comprehensive description of the relationship between visual stimuli and neuronal responses. Many neurons in the visual cortex exhibit nonlinear responses, making it difficult to characterize their stimulus-response relationships. Here, we recorded the responses of primary visual cortical neurons of the cat to spatiotemporal random-bar stimuli and trained artificial neural networks to predict the response of each neuron. The random initial connections in the networks consistently converged to regular patterns. Analyses of these connection patterns showed that the response of each complex cell to the random-bar stimuli could be well approximated by the sum of a small number of subunits resembling simple cells. The direction selectivity of each complex cell measured with drifting gratings was also well predicted by the combination of these subunits, indicating the generality of the model. These results are consistent with a simple functional model for complex cells and demonstrate the usefulness of the neural network method for revealing the stimulus-response transformations of nonlinear neurons.

Animals↗

PubMed2002

Adaptive spatiotemporal receptive field estimation in the visual pathway.

The encoding properties of the visual pathway are under constant control from mechanisms of adaptation and systems-level plasticity. In all but the most artificial experimental conditions, these mechanisms serve to continuously modulate the spatial and temporal receptive field (RF) dynamics. Conventional reverse-correlation techniques designed to capture spatiotemporal RF properties assume invariant stimulus-response relationships over experimental trials and are thus limited in their applicability to more natural experimental conditions. Presented here is an approach to tracking time-varying encoding dynamics in the early visual pathway based on adaptive estimation of the spatiotemporal RF in the time domain. Simulations and experimental data from the lateral geniculate nucleus reveal that subtle features of encoding properties can be captured by the adaptive approach that would otherwise be undetected. Capturing the role of dynamically varying encoding mechanisms is vital to our understanding of vision on the natural setting, where there is absence of a true steady state.

Adaptation, Physiological↗