Related papers: Temporal code versus rate code for binary Informat…
The nature of neural codes is central to neuroscience. Do neurons encode information through relatively slow changes in the emission rates of individual spikes (rate code), or by the precise timing of every spike (temporal codes)? Here we…
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…
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…
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…
Sensory stimuli are usually composed of different features (the what) appearing at irregular times (the when). Neural responses often use spike patterns to represent sensory information. The what is hypothesized to be encoded in the…
Neural coding is a field of study that concerns how sensory information is represented in the brain by networks of neurons. The link between external stimulus and neural response can be studied from two parallel points of view. The first,…
The mutual information between stimulus and spike-train response is commonly used to monitor neural coding efficiency, but neuronal computation broadly conceived requires more refined and targeted information measures of input-output joint…
Studies of motor control have almost universally examined firing rates to investigate how the brain shapes behavior. In principle, however, neurons could encode information through the precise temporal patterning of their spike trains as…
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…
Background: It is commonly assumed in neuronal coding that repeated presentations of a stimulus to a coding neuron elicit similar responses. One common way to assess similarity are spike train distances. These can be divided into…
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…
In nervous system information is conveyed by sequence of action potentials (spikes-trains). As MacKay and McCulloch proposed, spike-trains can be represented as bits sequences coming from Information Sources. Previously, we studied…
Spike bursting is a ubiquitous feature of all neuronal systems. Assuming the spiking states form an alphabet for a communication system, what is the optimal information processing rate? and what is the channel capacity? Here we demonstrate…
There is growing evidence regarding the importance of spike timing in neural information processing, with even a small number of spikes carrying information, but computational models lag significantly behind those for rate coding.…
The problem of neural coding is to understand how sequences of action potentials (spikes) are related to sensory stimuli, motor outputs, or (ultimately) thoughts and intentions. One clear question is whether the same coding rules are used…
Neurons in the nervous system convey information to higher brain regions by the generation of spike trains. An important question in the field of computational neuroscience is how these sensory neurons encode environmental information in a…
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…
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…
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 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…