Rate, not Selectivity, Determines Neuronal Population Coding Accuracy in Auditory Cortex. Sun, W. & Barbour, D. L. PLoS Biology, 15(11):e2002459, November, 2017.
Rate, not Selectivity, Determines Neuronal Population Coding Accuracy in Auditory Cortex [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
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.
@article{sun_rate_2017,
	title = {Rate, not {Selectivity}, {Determines} {Neuronal} {Population} {Coding} {Accuracy} in {Auditory} {Cortex}},
	volume = {15},
	issn = {1545-7885},
	url = {https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2002459},
	doi = {10.1371/journal.pbio.2002459},
	abstract = {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.},
	language = {eng},
	number = {11},
	journal = {PLoS Biology},
	author = {Sun, Wensheng and {Barbour, D. L.}},
	month = nov,
	year = {2017},
	pmid = {29091725},
	pmcid = {PMC5683657},
	keywords = {Acoustic Stimulation, Action Potentials, Animals, Auditory Cortex, Auditory Pathways, Auditory Perception, Callithrix, Neurons, Sound Localization},
	pages = {e2002459},
}

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