Thalamocortical cells receive sensory signals via primary sensory afferents and cortical signals via corticothalamic afferents. These signals are influenced by a variety of neuromodulators that are released in the thalamus during specific behavioral states. Hence, different neuromodulators may set different thalamic modes of sensory information processing. We found that noradrenergic activation...

Spatial attention has been postulated to facilitate perceptual processing via several different mechanisms. For instance, attention can amplify neural responses in sensory areas (sensory gain), mediate neural variability (noise modulation), or alter the manner in which sensory signals are selectively read out by postsensory decision mechanisms (efficient readout). Even in the context of simple ...

We extend a previously developed Bayesian framework for perception to account for sensory adaptation. We first note that the perceptual effects of adaptation seems inconsistent with an adjustment of the internally represented prior distribution. Instead, we postulate that adaptation increases the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements by adapting the operational range of the measurement stag...

Cooperative interactions among sensory receptors provide a general mechanism to increase the sensitivity of signal transduction. In particular, bacterial chemotaxis receptors interact cooperatively to produce an ultrasensitive response to chemoeffector concentrations. However, cooperativity between receptors in large macromolecular complexes is necessarily based on local interactions and conseq...

A recent study has shown that Jacky lizards adjust their movement-based visual signaling in response to the varying environmental conditions; the results indicate that this species has highly sophisticated communication and sensory processing strategies.

To determine how the vestibular sense controls balance, we used instantaneous head angular velocity to drive a galvanic vestibular stimulus so that afference would signal that head movement was faster or slower than actual. In effect, this changed vestibular afferent gain. This increased sway 4-fold when subjects (N = 8) stood without vision. However, after a 240 s conditioning period with stab...

The evolution of communicative signals involves a major hurdle; signals need to effectively stimulate the sensory systems of their targets. Therefore, sensory specializations of target animals are important sources of selection on signal structure. Here we report the discovery of an animal signal that uses a previously unknown communicative modality, infrared radiation or "radiant heat," which ...

During reach planning, we integrate multiple senses to estimate the location of the hand and the target, which is used to generate a movement. Visual and proprioceptive information are combined to determine the location of the hand. The goal of this study was to investigate whether multi-sensory integration is affected by extraretinal signals, such as head roll. It is believed that a coordinate...

Brief episodes of high-frequency firing of sensory neurons, or bursts, occur in many systems, including mammalian auditory and visual systems, and are believed to signal the occurrence of particularly important stimulus features, i.e., to function as feature detectors. However, the behavioral relevance of sensory bursts has not been established in any system. Here, we show that bursts in an ide...

Measuring functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses to parametric stimulus variations in imaging experiments can elucidate how sensory information is represented in the brain. However, a potential limitation of this approach is that fMRI responses reflect only a regional average of neuronal activity. For this reason stimulus-induced changes in fMRI signal may not always reflect how...