Adaptation to visual sparsity enhances responses to isolated stimuli

Sensory systems adapt their response properties to the statistics of their inputs. For instance, visual systems adapt to low-order statistics like mean and variance to encode stimuli efficiently or to facilitate specific downstream computations. However, it remains unclear how other statistical features affect sensory adaptation. Here, we explore how Drosophila’s visual motion circuits adapt to stimulus sparsity, a measure of the signal’s intermittency not captured by low-order statistics alone. Early visual neurons in both ON and OFF pathways alter their responses dramatically with stimulus sparsity, responding positively to both light and dark sparse stimuli but linearly to dense stimuli. These changes extend to downstream ON and OFF direction-selective neurons, which are activated by sparse stimuli of both polarities, but respond with opposite signs to light and dark regions of dense stimuli. Thus, sparse stimuli activate both ON and OFF pathways, recruiting a larger fraction of the ..., This dataset contains all experimental data necessary to create figures in Tong et al. (2024), as well as scripts to analyze them. The scripts are written in Matlab 2021b, and uses some functions from Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox., , # Data from: Adaptation to visual sparsity enhances responses to isolated stimuli

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t1g1jwtbs](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t1g1jwtbs)

## Description of the data and file structure

This repository contains the data and analysis scripts for the paper **\"Adaptation to visual sparsity enhances responses to isolated stimuli.\"**

* `sparsity_Dryad_upload.zip`: Complete dataset archive containing all data and scripts. Unzip it, and all the main analysis and plotting can be reproduced using the provided scripts and data.

### Folder structure

* `scripts/`: MATLAB scripts for data analysis and figure generation
* `data/`: `.mat` data files required by the scripts
* `utilities/`: helper functions used by the analysis scripts

### `scripts/`: Each script reproduces the indicated figure panels from the paper (and supplements) by loading the appropriate data from `data/`

* `fig1_naturalScene.m`: Fig 1A‑B, S1A‑D
* `fig1_Mi1GC6f_flash.m`: Fig 1G‑N, S2F‑L
* `fig2_con...,