On September 9, 2009, the Journal of Neuroscience published a research article entitled "The spatiotemporal frequency tuning of LGN receptive field facilitates neural discrimination of natural stimuli". This work was carried out by Zhongchao Tan from the laboratory of Dr. Hai-shan Yao at ION.

Theoretical studies suggest that the early visual system allows an efficient representation of natural stimuli. However, it is not clear whether the early visual processing can selectively amplify important signals in natural stimuli to facilitate discrimination. In this study, the authors examined the functional role of LGN spatiotemporal frequency tuning in the processing of natural scenes. They found that LGN neurons exhibit inseparable spatiotemporal frequency tuning in a manner consistent with the feature of optimal filters that can maximize information transmission of natural scenes. They also analyzed the spatiotemporal power spectrum of natural scenes and found that some frequencies exhibit larger variation in power across different scenes. Interestingly, the preferred frequency of ensemble LGN neurons matches the range of frequencies in which natural power spectrum varies most. The authors further showed that the match between LGN tuning and natural spectra variation enhances neural discrimination for natural stimuli. These results indicate that, in addition to removing redundancy, the spatiotemporal frequency characteristics of LGN neurons can facilitate neural discrimination of natural stimuli.