The Neural Basis for Combinatorial Coding in a Cortical Population Response

被引:65
作者
Osborne, Leslie C. [3 ,4 ]
Palmer, Stephanie E. [1 ,2 ]
Lisberger, Stephen G. [3 ,4 ,5 ]
Bialek, William [2 ]
机构
[1] Princeton Univ, Dept Phys, Lewis Sigler Inst Integrat Genom, Carl Icahn Lab, Princeton, NJ 08544 USA
[2] Princeton Univ, Joseph Henry Labs Phys, Princeton, NJ 08544 USA
[3] Univ Calif San Francisco, Ctr Integrat Neurosci, WM Keck Fdn, Sloan Swartz Ctr Theoret Neurobiol, San Francisco, CA 94143 USA
[4] Univ Calif San Francisco, Dept Physiol, San Francisco, CA 94143 USA
[5] Univ Calif San Francisco, Howard Hughes Med Inst, San Francisco, CA 94143 USA
基金
美国国家卫生研究院;
关键词
visual motion; MT; spike trains; information theory; smooth pursuit; correlated variability;
D O I
10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4390-08.2008
中图分类号
Q189 [神经科学];
学科分类号
071006 ;
摘要
We have used a combination of theory and experiment to assess how information is represented in a realistic cortical population response, examining how motion direction and timing is encoded in groups of neurons in cortical area MT. Combining data from several single-unit experiments, we constructed model population responses in small time windows and represented the response in each window as a binary vector of 1s or 0s signifying spikes or no spikes from each cell. We found that patterns of spikes and silence across a population of nominally redundant neurons can carry up to twice as much information about visual motion than does population spike count, even when the neurons respond independently to their sensory inputs. This extra information arises by virtue of the broad diversity of firing rate dynamics found in even very similarly tuned groups of MT neurons. Additionally, specific patterns of spiking and silence can carry more information than the sum of their parts (synergy), opening up the possibility for combinatorial coding in cortex. These results also held for populations in which we imposed levels of nonindependence (correlation) comparable to those found in cortical recordings. Our findings suggest that combinatorial codes are advantageous for representing stimulus information on short time scales, even when neurons have no complicated, stimulus-dependent correlation structure.
引用
收藏
页码:13522 / 13531
页数:10
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