From a whisper to a roar: adaptation to the mean and variance of naturalistic sounds

Abstract

In this issue of Neuron, Nagel and Doupe make a quantitative assessment of temporal adaptation in the avian auditory forebrain, capturing seemingly complex responses with a simple linear-nonlinear (LN) model of kinetics and gain. A comparison of these findings with similar results in the early visual system shows an important unifying picture of efficient sensory processing and adaptation.