702, mean novel AUC = 0.729 p = 0.004; late epoch, mean familiar AUC = 0.698,

mean novel AUC = 0.778, p < 0.001), with one monkey showing much stronger and reliable differences than the other. Visual experience, therefore, did not prevent neurons in ITC from contributing reliably to the encoding of both familiar and novel stimuli. Given that putative inhibitory cells had lower sparseness than putative selleck inhibitor excitatory cells but were better able to discriminate between any two arbitrarily chosen images, we wondered whether there was a relationship between sparseness and mean pairwise AUC values. In Figures 7C and 7D, we have plotted individual cells’ sparseness and mean pairwise AUC values for the early and late epochs (putative inhibitory units are indicated by open symbols). For both familiar (Figures 7C and 7D, black points and lines) and novel (green points and lines) stimuli, we observed a strong linear correlation between the two metrics. The correlation held even when we restricted the analysis to just the putative excitatory cells (Figures 7C and 7D, filled circles). This suggests that Selleck Torin 1 an increase in sparseness precluded a neuron from discriminating stimuli at the lower end of its firing rate distribution.

Because visual experience led to a considerable increase in sparseness, we conclude that individual ITC neurons contributed to the encoding of a smaller number of familiar compared to novel stimuli. Here, we asked whether visual long-term experience’s effects on single-neuron responses in ITC vary with cell type. We first showed that the best stimulus from the crotamiton familiar set drove putative excitatory cells much more robustly than the best stimulus from

the novel set. This effect was reversed for putative inhibitory cells. We further showed that, on average, both putative excitatory and putative inhibitory neurons responded with a smaller response to a randomly chosen familiar compared to novel stimulus, but this difference was much larger in the putative inhibitory population. We then went on to show that experience increased sparseness in putative excitatory neurons and, to a lesser degree, in putative inhibitory neurons. For the putative excitatory neurons, the experience-dependent increase in sparseness could be well accounted for by an increased firing rate to the top familiar stimulus. Finally, we demonstrated that the experience-dependent modifications have a minimal impact on the ability of ITC neurons to discriminate between the stimuli in the novel set. In Figure 8, we provide a schematic summarizing the observed firing rate changes in both classes of neurons.