ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2014
Refractory sampling links efficiency and costs of sensory encoding to stimulus statistics.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Light adaptation of the microvillus refractory period in blow fly photoreceptors.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2026Article
- Synaptic high-frequency jumping synchronises vision to high-speed behaviour.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Investments in photoreceptors compete with investments in optics to determine eye design.eLife · 2026Article
- Article
- A recurrent neural circuit in Drosophila temporally sharpens visual inputs.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Stimulator compensation and generation of Gaussian noise stimuli with defined amplitude spectra for studying input-output relations of sensory systems.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Article
- Binocular mirror-symmetric microsaccadic sampling enablesProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- High-speed imaging of light-induced photoreceptor microsaccades in compound eyes.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Article
- Electrophysiological adaptations of insect photoreceptors and their elementary responses to diurnal and nocturnal lifestyles.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2020Article
- CaThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- Image statistics of the environment surrounding freely behaving hoverflies.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2019Article
- Integration of Small- and Wide-Field Visual Features in Target-Selective Descending Neurons of both Predatory and Nonpredatory Dipterans.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2018Article
- Effects of phase correlations in naturalistic stimuli on quantitative information coding by fly photoreceptors.Journal of neurophysiology · 2018Article
- Article
- How a fly photoreceptor samples light information in time.The Journal of physiology · 2017Review
- A biomimetic fly photoreceptor model elucidates how stochastic adaptive quantal sampling provides a large dynamic range.The Journal of physiology · 2017Review
- Modeling elucidates how refractory period can provide profound nonlinear gain control to graded potential neurons.Physiological reports · 2017Article
- The remarkable visual capacities of nocturnal insects: vision at the limits with small eyes and tiny brains.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Vision in dim light: highlights and challenges.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Sensory neurons integrate information about the world, adapting their sampling to its changes. However, little is understood mechanistically how this primary encoding process, which ultimately limits perception, depends upon stimulus statistics. Here, we analyze this open question systematically by using intracellular recordings from fly (Drosophila melanogaster and Coenosia attenuata) photoreceptors and corresponding stochastic simulations from biophysically realistic photoreceptor models. Recordings show that photoreceptors can sample more information from naturalistic light intensity time series (NS) than from Gaussian white-noise (GWN), shuffled-NS or Gaussian-1/f stimuli; integrating larger responses with higher signal-to-noise ratio and encoding efficiency to large bursty contrast changes. Simulations reveal how a photoreceptor's information capture depends critically upon the stochastic refractoriness of its 30,000 sampling units (microvilli). In daylight, refractoriness sacrifices sensitivity to enhance intensity changes in neural image representations, with more and faster microvilli improving encoding. But for GWN and other stimuli, which lack longer dark contrasts of real-world intensity changes that reduce microvilli refractoriness, these performance gains are submaximal and energetically costly. These results provide mechanistic reasons why information sampling is more efficient for natural/naturalistic stimulation and novel insight into the operation, design, and evolution of signaling and code in sensory neurons.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.