In neuroscience, neuronal tuning refers to the hypothesized property of brain cells by which they selectively represent a particular type of sensory, association, motor, or cognitive information.
[5] They discovered that oriented slits of light were the most effective (of a very small set tested) stimuli for striate cortex “simple cell” neurons.
[5] Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981 for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system.
"[2]) While these simple cells in V1 respond to oriented bars through small receptive fields, the optimal visual stimulus becomes increasing complex as one moves toward the anterior of the brain.
[8] The specific tuning of intermediate neurons in the ventral stream is less clear, because the range of form variety that can be utilized for probing is nearly infinite.
[13] Curran et al (2002) similarly trained people in a less structured class of objects called "blobs" and showed FFA selective activation for them.
In the auditory system, different neurons may respond selectively to the frequency (pitch), amplitude (loudness), and/or complexity (uniqueness) of sounds.