Nature Neuroscience 8, 1643 - 1646 (2005)
Published online: 23 November 2005; | doi:10.1038/nn1608
A natural approach to studying visionGidon Felsen1
& Yang Dan21
Gidon Felsen is at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA. 2
Yang Dan is in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720-3200, USA. ydan@berkeley.edu
An ultimate goal of systems neuroscience is to understand how sensory stimuli encountered in the natural environment are processed by neural circuits. Achieving this goal requires knowledge of both the characteristics of natural stimuli and the response properties of sensory neurons under natural stimulation. Most of our current notions of sensory processing have come from experiments using simple, parametric stimulus sets. However, a growing number of researchers have begun to question whether this approach alone is sufficient for understanding the real-life sensory tasks performed by the organism. Here, focusing on the early visual pathway, we argue that the use of natural stimuli is vital for advancing our understanding of sensory processing.
MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS These links to content published by NPG are automatically generated.
|
