that they receive convergent excitatory inputs from surrounding principal cells irrespective of their tuning properties (Bock et al., 2011). In other words, the tuning of an interneuron may reflect the average tuning of the network of excitatory neurons it is embedded in. If the surrounding network is homogenously tuned to a specific feature, interneurons inherit that feature selectivity (as for interneurons in an orientation column of the cat (Cardin et al., 2007). If the surrounding network is heterogenous, such as in the rodent visual (Ohki et al., 2005), auditory (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2010; Rothschild et al., 2010) and olfactory cortices (Stettler and Axel, 2009), interneurons will be more broadly tuned.
