English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Humans and animals are known to share an ability to estimate or compare the numerosity of visual stimuli, and this ability is considered to be supported by the cortical neurons that have unimodal tuning for numerosity, referred to as the numerosity detector neurons. How such unimodal numerosity tuning is shaped through plasticity mechanisms is unknown. Here, I propose a testable hypothetical mechanism based on recently revealed features of the neuronal dendrite, namely, cooperative plasticity induction and nonlinear input integration at nearby dendritic sites, on the basis of the existing proposal that individual visual stimuli are represented as similar localized activities regardless of the size or the shape in a cortical region in the dorsal visual pathway. Intriguingly, the proposed mechanism naturally explains a prominent feature of the numerosity detector neurons, namely, the broadening of the tuning curve in proportion to the preferred numerosity, which is considered to underlie the known Weber-Fechner law-dependent accuracy of numerosity estimation and comparison. The simulated tuning curves are less sharp than reality, however, and together with the evidence from human imaging studies that numerical representation is a distributed phenomenon, it may not be likely that the proposed mechanism operates by itself. Rather, the proposed mechanism might facilitate the formation of hierarchical circuitry proposed in the previous studies, which includes neurons with monotonic numerosity tuning as well as those with sharp unimodal tuning, by serving as an efficient initial condition.

Possible dendritic contribution to unimodal numerosity tuning and Weber-Fechner law-dependent numerical cognition