Natural Scene Coding Consistency in Genetically-Defined Cell Populations

Abstract

Understanding how genetically-defined cell populations encode visual information remains a fundamental challenge in systems neuroscience. While extensive research has characterized individual cell responses to simple stimuli such as static gratings, the population-level coding principles that govern naturalistic visual processing across cell types remain largely unexplored. We analyzed population responses from 43,018 neurons across 12 genetically-defined cell types in 243 mice from the Allen Brain Observatory, comparing representational geometry between natural scenes and static gratings. We found that inhibitory cell populations (VIP, SST, PV) cluster distinctly in representational space almost independent of anatomical location when responding to natural scenes but not static gratings, suggesting preserved cell-type specific computational functions specific for natural scenes. To assess coding capacity of a population of neurons, we developed Inter-Individual Representational Similarity (IIRS), which measures consistency of neural representations across different individuals in response to an ensemble of stimuli. All inhibitory populations showed significantly higher IIRS for natural scenes compared to static gratings, indicating consistent encoding of naturalistic visual features across individuals comparable to excitatory populations (Cux2, Rorb, Rbp4). Parallel analysis of neural networks trained on natural images (ImageNet) with different random initializations revealed similar patterns: models showed higher cross-initialization similarity for naturalistic stimuli compared to static gratings, suggesting that cross-individual consistency emerges when experimental stimuli engage the features that neural circuits are adapted to extract. These findings establish IIRS as a metric for identifying coding capacity in cell populations and reveal that inhibitory cell populations encode consistent aspects of natural scenes across individuals, indicating these circuits may have evolved specialized tuning for naturalistic visual environments.