Selective Adaptation

Question 1

Do the levels of analysis connect?

Answer 1

How does the implementational level match our experience at the computational level?

Question 2

selective adaptation helps to construct a psychophysics experiment to test…

Answer 2

….the connection between feature detector response and perception

Question 3

what is selective adaptation?

Answer 3

• neurons tuned to specific stimuli (features) fatigue (or adapt) when exposure is long

short term phenomena (until the neurons recover)

Question 4

fatigue or adaption to stimulus results in two main effects

Answer 4

• the neural firing rate will decrease

- the same neurons will fire less when a similar stimulus is immediately presented again

Question 5

why is it selective?

Answer 5

neuron is tuned to a SPECIFIC feature (the vertical grating)

Question 6

experience dependent plasticity

Answer 6

tortured kitten by putting them in a box with only vertical bars to see if they would only develop the feature detectors that corresponded to vertical bars and not horizontal bars

results: they were unable to see horizontal bars (didn’t develop the cells that responded to horizontal lines)

behavioral and neural responses showed the development of neurons specific to the environmental stimuli and absence of cells responded to opposite orientation