Temporal precision in the visual pathway through the interplay of excitation and stimulus-driven suppression

Visual neurons can respond with extremely precise temporal patterning to visual stimuli that change on much slower time scales. Here, we investigate how the precise timing of cat thalamic spike trains-which can have timing as precise as 1 ms-is related to the stimulus, in the context of both artificial noise and natural visual stimuli. Using a nonlinear modeling framework applied to extracellular data, we demonstrate that the precise timing of thalamic spike trains can be explained by the interplay between an excitatory input and a delayed suppressive input that resembles inhibition, such that neuronal responses only occur in brief windows where excitation exceeds suppression. The resulting description of thalamic computation resembles earlier models of contrast adaptation, suggesting a more general role for mechanisms of contrast adaptation in visual processing. Thus, we describe a more complex computation underlying thalamic responses to artificial and natural stimuli that has implications for understanding how visual information is represented in the early stages of visual processing.