Signal switching may enhance processing power of the brain.

Our ability to perceive multiple objects is mysterious. Sensory neurons are broadly tuned, producing potential overlap in the populations of neurons activated by each object in a scene. This overlap raises questions about how distinct information is retained about each item.

Multiple objects evoke fluctuating responses in several regions of the visual pathway.

How neural representations preserve information about multiple stimuli is mysterious. Because tuning of individual neurons is coarse (e.g.

Multiple objects evoke fluctuating responses in several regions of the visual pathway.

Unlabelled: How neural representations preserve information about multiple stimuli is mysterious. Because tuning of individual neurons is coarse (for example, visual receptive field diameters can exceed perceptual resolution), the populations of neurons potentially responsive to each individual stimulus can overlap, raising the question of how information about each item might be segregated and preserved in the population. We recently reported evidence for a potential solution to this problem: when two stimuli were present, some neurons in the macaque visual cortical areas V1 and V4 exhibited fluctuating firing patterns, as if they responded to only one individual stimulus at a time.

Visual Signals in the Mammalian Auditory System.

Coordination between different sensory systems is a necessary element of sensory processing. Where and how signals from different sense organs converge onto common neural circuitry have become topics of increasing interest in recent years. In this article, we focus specifically on visual-auditory interactions in areas of the mammalian brain that are commonly considered to be auditory in function.

Binocular deprivation induces both age-dependent and age-independent forms of plasticity in parvalbumin inhibitory neuron visual response properties.

Activity of cortical inhibitory interneurons is rapidly reduced in response to monocular deprivation during the critical period for ocular dominance plasticity and in response to salient events encountered during learning. In the case of primary sensory cortex, a decrease in mean evoked firing rate of parvalbumin-positive (PV) inhibitory neurons is causally linked to a reorganization of excitatory networks following sensory perturbation. Converging evidence indicates that it is deprivation, and not an imbalance between open- and closed-eye inputs, that triggers rapid plasticity in PV neurons.