Temporal saliency for motion direction may arise from visual stimulus-specific adaptation in avian midbrain inhibitory nucleus

Abstract

Food and predators are the most noteworthy objects for the basic survival of wild animals. In nature, both of these are often rare or deviant in both spatial and temporal domains and would soon attract an animals attention. Although stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) is considered to be one neural basis of salient sound detection in the temporal domain, related research on visual SSA is lacking. The avian nucleus isthmi pars magnocellularis (Imc), which plays an extremely important role in the selective attention network, is one of the best models for investigating the neural correlate of visual stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) and detection of salient stimulus in the temporal domain. Here, we used a constant order paradigm to test the existence of SSA in the pigeons Imc. We found that the strength of response of Imc neurons significantly decreased after repetitive motion stimuli, but recovered when the motion was switched to a novel direction, leading to the saliency detection of the novel motion direction. These results suggest that the inhibitory nucleus Imc shows visual SSA to motion direction, allowing the Imc to implement temporal saliency mapping and to determine the spatial-temporal saliency of the current stimulus. This also implies that pigeons may detect novel spatial-temporal stimuli during the early stage of sensory processing.