Analyzing mechanosensory transduction by identifying invariant directions in stimulus space

摘要

Extended receptive fields are characteristic for the integrative properties of sensory neurons. How this integration is performed is an important aspect in understanding neural coding and can give insight into the computations and the biophysics involved. We present a method of systematically investigating the nature of spectral integration in auditory receptor neurons by analyzing how these neurons combine intensities contained in different parts of the stimulus spectrum. The method consists of identifying regions in parameter space that lead to the same neural response, and it is also applicable to other stimulus domains.