Tailoring of variability in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the cat.

Variability is usually considered an unwanted component in a sensory signal, yet the visual system does not seem to filter out the noise. On the contrary, noise is 'tailored' to scale with the signal size. We show that this tailoring occurs in the lateral geniculate nucleus, preferentially in X-cells, which are the cells most likely to transmit pattern information. Tailoring the variability to the signal size may be the visual system's way of providing the right amount of variability for a signal of any magnitude at all times during the computation.