Related papers: Evaluating performance of neural codes in model ne…
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…
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…
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…
We investigate the performance of sparsely-connected networks of integrate-and-fire neurons for ultra-short term information processing. We exploit the fact that the population activity of networks with balanced excitation and inhibition…
Spike generation in neurons produces a temporal point process, whose statistics is governed by intrinsic phenomena and the external incoming inputs to be coded. In particular, spike-evoked adaptation currents support a slow temporal process…
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…
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…
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…
The role of synchronous firing in sensory coding and cognition remains controversial. While studies, focusing on its mechanistic consequences in attentional tasks, suggest that synchronization dynamically boosts sensory processing, others…
Recurrently connected neuron populations play key roles in sensory perception and memory storage across various brain regions. While these populations are often assumed to encode information through firing rates, this method becomes…
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…
In sensory neurons the presence of noise can facilitate the detection of weak information-carrying signals, which are encoded and transmitted via correlated sequences of spikes. Here we investigate relative temporal order in spike sequences…
A good understanding of how neurons use electrical pulses (i.e, spikes) to encode the signal information remains elusive. Analyzing spike sequences generated by individual neurons and by two coupled neurons (using the stochastic…
Short-term changes in efficacy have been postulated to enhance the ability of synapses to transmit information between neurons, and within neuronal networks. Even at the level of connections between single neurons, direct confirmation of…
When inhibitory neurons constitute about 40% of neurons they could have an important antinociceptive role, as they would easily regulate the level of activity of other neurons. We consider a simple network of cortical spiking neurons with…
Sensory neurons give highly variable responses to stimulation, which can limit the amount of stimulus information available to downstream circuits. Much work has investigated the factors that affect the amount of information encoded in…
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…
Neurons encode and transmit information in spike sequences. However, despite the effort devoted to quantify their information content, little progress has been made in this regard. Here we use a nonlinear method of time-series analysis…
We consider the information transmission problem in neurons and its possible implications for learning in neural networks. Our approach is based on recent developments in statistical physics and complexity science. Combining sensory…
Realizations of low firing rates in neural networks usually require globally balanced distributions among excitatory and inhibitory links, while feasibility of temporal coding is limited by neuronal millisecond precision. We show that…