Spatio-temporal correlations and visual signalling in a complete neuronal population.

ABSTRACT: Statistical dependencies in the responses of sensory neurons govern both the amount of stimulus information conveyed and the means by which downstream neurons can extract it. Although a variety of measurements indicate the existence of such dependencies, their origin and importance for neural coding are poorly understood. Here we analyse the functional significance of correlated firing in a complete population of macaque parasol retinal ganglion cells using a model of multi-neuron spike responses. The model, with parameters fit directly to physiological data, simultaneously captures both the stimulus dependence and detailed spatio-temporal correlations in population responses, and provides two insights into the structure of the neural code. First, neural encoding at the population level is

SUBMITTER: Pillow JW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2684455 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature