Signatures of hierarchical temporal processing in the mouse visual system

A core challenge for the brain is to process information across various timescales. This could be achieved by a hierarchical organization of temporal processing through intrinsic mechanisms (e.g., recurrent coupling or adaptation), but recent evidence from spike recordings of the rodent visual system seems to conflict with this hypothesis. Here, we used an optimized information-theoretic and classical autocorrelation analysis to show that information- and intrinsic timescales of spiking activity increase along the anatomical hierarchy of the mouse visual system, while information-theoretic predictability decreases. Moreover, the timescale hierarchy was invariant to the stimulus condition, whereas the decrease in predictability was strongest under natural movie stimulation. We could reproduce this effect in a basic recurrent network model with correlated sensory input. Our findings suggest that the rodent visual system indeed employs intrinsic mechanisms to achieve longer integration for higher cortical areas, while simultaneously reducing predictability for an efficient neural code.