Contrast sensitivity is enhanced by expansive nonlinear processing in the lateral geniculate nucleus.

The firing rates of neurons in the central visual pathway vary with stimulus strength, but not necessarily in a linear manner. In the contrast domain, the neural response function for cells in the primary visual cortex is characterized by expansive and compressive nonlinearities at low and high contrasts, respectively. A compressive nonlinearity at high contrast is also found for early visual pathway neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). This mechanism affects processing in the visual cortex. A fundamentally related issue is the possibility of an expansive nonlinearity at low contrast in LGN. To examine this possibility, we have obtained contrast-response data for a population of LGN neurons. We find for most cells that the best-fit function requires an expansive component. Additionally, we have measured the responses of LGN neurons to m-sequence white noise and examined the static relationship between a linear prediction and actual spike rate. We find that this static relationship is well fit by an expansive nonlinear power law with average exponent of 1.58. These results demonstrate that neurons in early visual pathways exhibit expansive nonlinear responses at low contrasts. Although this thalamic expansive nonlinearity has been largely ignored in models of early visual processing, it may have important consequences because it potentially affects the interpretation of a variety of visual functions.