Related papers: Millisecond-scale motor encoding in a cortical voc…
A fundamental problem in neuroscience is to understand how sequences of action potentials ("spikes") encode information about sensory signals and motor outputs. Although traditional theories of neural coding assume that information is…
Practice of a complex motor gesture involves exploration of motor space to attain a better match to target output, but little is known about the neural code for such exploration. Here, we examine spiking in an area of the songbird brain…
Our knowledge of the sensory world is encoded by neurons in sequences of discrete, identical pulses termed action potentials or spikes. There is persistent controversy about the extent to which the precise timing of these spikes is relevant…
In nature, animals encounter high dimensional sensory stimuli that have complex statistical and dynamical structure. Attempts to study the neural coding of these natural signals face challenges both in the selection of the signal ensemble…
We demonstrate that the information contained in the spike occurrence times of a population of neurons can be broken up into a series of terms, each of which reflect something about potential coding mechanisms. This is possible in the…
The problem of deciphering how low-level patterns (action potentials in the brain, amino acids in a protein, etc.) drive high-level biological features (sensorimotor behavior, enzymatic function) represents the central challenge of…
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…
Neuroscientists formulate very different hypotheses about the nature of neural code. At one extreme, it has been argued that neurons encode information in relatively slow changes of individual spikes arriving "rates codes" and the…
Information needs to be appropriately encoded to be reliably transmitted over physical media. Similarly, neurons have their own codes to convey information in the brain. Even though it is well-known that neurons exchange information using a…
The nervous system represents time-dependent signals in sequences of discrete action potentials or spikes, all spikes are identical so that information is carried only in the spike arrival times. We show how to quantify this information, in…
Neurons in the brain communicate information via punctual events called spikes. The timing of spikes is thought to carry rich information, but it is not clear how to leverage this in digital systems. We demonstrate that event-based encoding…
Frequency discrimination is a fundamental task of the auditory system. The mammalian inner ear, or cochlea, provides a place code in which different frequencies are detected at different spatial locations. However, a temporal code based on…
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…
Incoming sound is in cochlea and auditory nerve encoded into spike trains. At the third neuron of the auditory pathway, spike trains of the left and right sides are processed in brainstem nuclei to yield sound localization information. Two…
It has long been debated whether information in the brain is coded at the rate of neuronal spiking or at the precise timing of single spikes. Although this issue is essential to the understanding of neural signal processing, it is not…
In the last century, most sensorimotor studies of cortical neurons relied on average firing rates. Rate coding is efficient for fast sensorimotor processing that occurs within a few seconds. Much less is known about the neural mechanisms…
Temporal coding is one approach to representing information in spiking neural networks. An example of its application is the location of sounds by barn owls that requires especially precise temporal coding. Dependent upon the azimuthal…
Two elements of neural information processing have primarily been proposed: firing rate and spike timing of neurons. In the case of synaptic plasticity, although spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) depending on presynaptic and…
The timing of individual neuronal spikes is essential for biological brains to make fast responses to sensory stimuli. However, conventional artificial neural networks lack the intrinsic temporal coding ability present in biological…
Spike patterns have been reported to encode sensory information in several brain areas. Here we assess the role of specific patterns in the neural code, by comparing the amount of information transmitted with different choices of the…