Rate, not selectivity, determines neuronal population coding accuracy in auditory cortex.
The notion that neurons with higher selectivity carry more information about external sensory inputs is widely accepted in neuroscience. High-selectivity neurons respond to a narrow range of sensory inputs, and thus would be considered highly informative by rejecting a large proportion of possible i...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
2017-11-01
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| Series: | PLoS Biology |
| Online Access: | http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5683657?pdf=render |
| Summary: | The notion that neurons with higher selectivity carry more information about external sensory inputs is widely accepted in neuroscience. High-selectivity neurons respond to a narrow range of sensory inputs, and thus would be considered highly informative by rejecting a large proportion of possible inputs. In auditory cortex, neuronal responses are less selective immediately after the onset of a sound and then become highly selective in the following sustained response epoch. These 2 temporal response epochs have thus been interpreted to encode first the presence and then the content of a sound input. Contrary to predictions from that prevailing theory, however, we found that the neural population conveys similar information about sound input across the 2 epochs in spite of the neuronal selectivity differences. The amount of information encoded turns out to be almost completely dependent upon the total number of population spikes in the read-out window for this system. Moreover, inhomogeneous Poisson spiking behavior is sufficient to account for this property. These results imply a novel principle of sensory encoding that is potentially shared widely among multiple sensory systems. |
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| ISSN: | 1544-9173 1545-7885 |