Abstract
A long-standing hypothesis at the interface of physics and neuroscience is that neural networks self-organize to the critical point of a phase transition, thereby optimizing aspects of sensory information processing1,2,3. This idea is partially supported by strong evidence for critical dynamics observed in the cerebral cortex4,5,6,7,8,9,10, but the impact of sensory input on these dynamics is largely unknown. Thus, the foundations of this hypothesis—the self-organization process and how it manifests during strong sensory input—remain unstudied experimentally. Here we show in visual cortex and in a computational model that strong sensory input initially elicits cortical network dynamics that are not critical, but adaptive changes in the network rapidly tune the system to criticality. This conclusion is based on observations of multifaceted scaling laws predicted to occur at criticality4,11. Our findings establish sensory adaptation as a self-organizing mechanism that maintains criticality in visual cortex during sensory information processing.
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Acknowledgements
We thank J. Clark for comments on previous versions of the manuscript. This research was supported by a Whitehall Foundation grant #20121221 (R.W.), a NSF CRCNS grant #1308174 (W.L.S.) and #1308159 (R.W.), and startup funds from the Department of Physics at the University of Arkansas (W.L.S.). We thank J. Gallant for sharing motion-enhanced movie stimuli.
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W.L.S. and R.W. conceived the study and designed the experiments. J.P. designed the visual stimuli. W.L.S., W.P.C., J.P., N.C.W. and R.W. performed the experiments. W.L.S. and W.P.C. analysed the data. W.L.S. and Y.K. performed the model simulations. W.L.S. and R.W. wrote the paper.
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Shew, W., Clawson, W., Pobst, J. et al. Adaptation to sensory input tunes visual cortex to criticality. Nature Phys 11, 659–663 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3370
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3370
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