Remarkable trial-by-trial variability is apparent in cortical responses to repeating stimulus presentations. This neural variability across trials is relatively high before stimulus presentation, and then reduced (i.e., quenched) ~0.2s after stimulus presentation. Individual subjects exhibit different magnitudes of variability quenching, and previous work from our lab has revealed that individuals with larger variability quenching exhibit lower (i.e., better) perceptual thresholds in a contrast discrimination task. Here, we examined whether similar findings were also apparent in a motion detection task, which is processed by distinct neural populations in the visual system. We recorded EEG data from 35 adult subjects as they detected the direction of coherent motion in random dot kinematograms. The results demonstrated that individual magnitudes of variability quenching were significantly correlated with coherent motion thresholds, particularly when presenting stimuli with low dot densities, where coherent motion was more difficult to detect. These findings provide consistent support for the hypothesis that larger magnitudes of neural variability quenching are associated with better perceptual abilities in multiple visual domain tasks.

中文翻译：

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神经变异淬灭的个体幅度与运动感知能力相关

在皮质对重复刺激呈现的反应中，明显的试验变异性是显而易见的。在刺激呈现之前，这种跨试验的神经变异性相对较高，然后在刺激呈现后减少（即淬灭）~0.2 秒。个体受试者表现出不同程度的变异性猝灭，我们实验室之前的工作表明，具有较大变异性猝灭的个体在对比辨别任务中表现出较低（即更好）的感知阈值。在这里，我们检查了类似的发现是否在运动检测任务中也很明显，该任务由视觉系统中的不同神经群体处理。我们记录了 35 名成年受试者的 EEG 数据，因为他们在随机点运动图中检测到相干运动的方向。结果表明，个体变异性猝灭的幅度与相干运动阈值显着相关，特别是当呈现具有低点密度的刺激时，相干运动更难以检测。这些发现为以下假设提供了一致的支持，即更大程度的神经变异性淬灭与多个视觉领域任务中更好的感知能力相关。