Adaptation facilitates spatial discrimination for deviant locations in the thalamic reticular nucleus of the rat

The capacity to identify unanticipated abnormal cues in a natural scene is vital for animal survival. Stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) has been considered the neuronal correlate for deviance detection. There have been comprehensive assessments of SSA in the frequency domain along the ascending auditory pathway, but only little attention given to deviance detection in the spatial domain. We found that thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) neurons exhibited stronger responses to a tone when it was presented rarely as opposed to frequently at a certain spatial location. Subsequently, we engaged signal detection theory to directly gauge neuronal spatial discriminability and found that discrimination of deviant locations was considerably higher than standard locations. The variability in neuronal spatial discriminability among the TRN population was directly related to response difference (RD) but not variance; meanwhile, further analyses attributed higher spatial sensitivity at deviant locations to larger RD. Astonishingly, a significant correlation was found between the amount of adaptation and deviant discriminability. Collectively, our results suggest that adaptation facilitates rare location discrimination by sharpening the response gap between two locations.