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The visual system adapts to maintain sensitivity and selectivity over a large range of luminance intensities. One way that the retina maintains sensitivity across night and day is by switching between rod and cone photoreceptors, which alters the receptive fields and interneuronal correlations of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). While these adaptations allow the retina to transmit visual information to the brain across environmental conditions, the code used for that transmission varies. To determine how downstream targets encode visual scenes across light levels, we measured the effects of luminance adaptation on thalamic and cortical population activity. While changes in the retinal output are evident in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), selectivity in the primary visual cortex (V1) is largely invariant to the changes in luminance. We show that the visual system could maintain sensitivity across environmental conditions without altering cortical selectivity through the convergence of parallel functional pathways from the thalamus to the cortex. [Display omitted] • Adaptation alters the thalamic neural code between scotopic and photopic luminance • Visual cortex exhibits largely luminance-invariant selectivity and noise correlations • The convergence of parallel pathways can generate a luminance-invariant code O'Shea et al. investigates how the transition between cone- and rod-mediated vision affects neural representations in central visual areas of the mouse. Whereas the thalamus inherits luminance-dependent functional properties from the retina, visual cortex exhibits a luminance-invariant code. The convergence of parallel afferent pathways can generate a luminance-invariant code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] LGN architecture is inherited by V1: left/right eye, On/Off, parvo/magno/konio. [•] V1 maps of inherited tuning may be linked to V1 maps of emergent tuning. [•] Emergent feature maps in V1: disparity, orientation, direction. [•] Direction maps are seeded by orientation maps at a later developmental time point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]