Neuron 60, 162–173 (2008)

An animal's response to a stimulus depends on context, and it has now been shown that the connections between individual neurons depend on context as well. Marlene Cohen and William Newsome of Stanford University School of Medicine in California followed two direction-selective neurons in the middle temporal area of a monkey's brain as it looked at the same visual stimulus in two contexts.

The two cells were affiliated with the trajectories of two dots on a screen. The two neurons made the same direction judgement when the monkey was asked to distinguish between northwards and southwards motion, but different judgements when asked to distinguish between eastwards and westwards.

The researchers found that, in general, the responses of the two neurons were more similar when they contributed to the same direction judgement. They presume that connection strength somewhere upstream of the target neurons changes depending on the task.