High response reliability of neurons in primary visual cortex (V1) of alert, trained monkeys

The reliability of neuronal responses determines the resources needed to represent the external world and constrains the nature of the neural code. Studies of anesthetized animals have indicated that neuronal responses become progressively more variable as information travels from the retina to the cortex. These results have been interpreted to indicate that perception must be based on pooling across relatively large numbers of cells. However, we find that in alert monkeys, responses in primary visual cortex (V1) are as reliable as the inputs from the retina and the thalamus. Moreover, when the effects of fixational eye movements were minimized, response variability (variance/mean - Fano factor, FF) in all V1 layers was low. When presenting optimal stimuli, the median FF was 0.3. High variability, FF approximately 1, was found only near threshold. Our results suggest that in natural vision, suprathreshold perception can be based on small numbers of optimally stimulated cells.