Related papers: Stimulus-dependent correlations and population cod…
A central question in neuroscience is to understand how noisy firing patterns are used to transmit information. Because neural spiking is noisy, spiking patterns are often quantified via pairwise correlations, or the probability that two…
The activity of neurons within brain circuits has been ubiquitously reported to be correlated. The impact of these correlations on brain function has been extensively investigated. Correlations can in principle increase or decrease the…
Neural networks encode information through their collective spiking activity in response to external stimuli. This population response is noisy and strongly correlated, with complex interplay between correlations induced by the stimulus,…
Which statistical features of spiking activity matter for how stimuli are encoded in neural populations? A vast body of work has explored how firing rates in individual cells and correlations in the spikes of cell pairs impact coding. But…
In a recent study the initial rise of the mutual information between the firing rates of N neurons and a set of p discrete stimuli has been analytically evaluated, under the assumption that neurons fire independently of one another to each…
Stimulus from the environment that guides behavior and informs decisions is encoded in the firing rates of neural populations. Each neuron in the populations, however, does not spike independently: spike events are correlated from cell to…
When two stimuli are present in the receptive field of a V4 neuron, the firing rate response is between the weakest and strongest response elicited by each of the stimuli alone (Reynolds et al, 1999, Journal of Neuroscience 19:1736-1753).…
The correlated variability in the responses of a neural population to the repeated presentation of a sensory stimulus is a universally observed phenomenon. Such correlations have been studied in much detail, both with respect to their…
We study the capacity with which a system of independent neuron-like units represents a given set of stimuli. We assume that each neuron provides a fixed amount of information, and that the information provided by different neurons has a…
Positive correlations in the activity of neurons are widely observed in the brain. Previous studies have shown these correlations to be detrimental to the fidelity of population codes or at best marginally favorable compared to independent…
Humans and other animals base their decisions on noisy sensory input. Much work has therefore been devoted to understanding the computations that underly such decisions. The problem has been studied in a variety of tasks and with stimuli of…
Redundancies and correlations in the responses of sensory neurons seem to waste neural resources but can carry cues about structured stimuli and may help the brain to correct for response errors. To assess how the retina negotiates this…
At the single-neuron level, precisely timed spikes can either constitute firing-rate codes or spike-pattern codes that utilize the relative timing between consecutive spikes. There has been little experimental support for the hypothesis…
Over repeat presentations of the same stimulus, sensory neurons show variable responses. This "noise" is typically correlated between pairs of cells, and a question with rich history in neuroscience is how these noise correlations impact…
The coding properties of cells with different types of receptive fields have been studied for decades. ON-type neurons fire in response to positive fluctuations of the time-dependent stimulus, whereas OFF cells are driven by negative…
Neural correlations play a critical role in sensory information coding. They are of two kinds: signal correlations, when neurons have overlapping sensitivities, and noise correlations from network effects and shared noise. In experiments…
A general method for deriving maximally informative sigmoidal tuning curves for neural systems with small normalized variability is presented. The optimal tuning curve is a nonlinear function of the cumulative distribution function of the…
Advances in large-scale neural recordings have expanded our ability to describe the activity of distributed brain circuits. However, understanding how neural population dynamics differ across regions and behavioral contexts remains…
Most neurons in the primary visual cortex initially respond vigorously when a preferred stimulus is presented, but adapt as stimulation continues. The functional consequences of adaptation are unclear. Typically a reduction of firing rate…
One of the fundamental characteristics of a nonlinear system is how it transfers correlations in its inputs to correlations in its outputs. This is particularly important in the nervous system, where correlations between spiking neurons are…