Um dicionário de sinônimos para um código de população neural

sexta-feira, setembro 11, 2015

A thesaurus for a neural population code

Elad Ganmor, Ronen Segev, Elad SchneidmanCorresponding Author

Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06134

Published September 8, 2015

Cite as eLife 2015;4:e06134



Abstract

Information is carried in the brain by the joint spiking patterns of large groups of noisy, unreliable neurons. This noise limits the capacity of the neural code and determines how information can be transmitted and read-out. To accurately decode, the brain must overcome this noise and identify which patterns are semantically similar. We use models of network encoding noise to learn a thesaurus for populations of neurons in the vertebrate retina responding to artificial and natural videos, measuring the similarity between population responses to visual stimuli based on the information they carry. This thesaurus reveals that the code is organized in clusters of synonymous activity patterns that are similar in meaning but may differ considerably in their structure. This organization is highly reminiscent of the design of engineered codes. We suggest that the brain may use this structure and show how it allows accurate decoding of novel stimuli from novel spiking patterns.

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