2Stefano Panzeri
Howard Hughes Medical
Institute & Center for Neural Science
University of Newcastle Upon
Tyne
Any
direct estimate of the complete spike train information is limited by sampling
considerations to relatively small word lengths, and therefore to the analysis
of short time windows of data. The
series expansion approach takes advantage of this limit to create a more
manageable estimation problem. In this
talk I will discuss the sampling issues with respect to a selection of primate
V1 complex cells from which sufficient experimental trails were available. Estimation of the noise entropy by both series
and ‘brute force’ procedures will be compared.
We have also applied this analysis procedure to data recorded from the
rat barrel cortex by M. Diamond and colleagues. This analysis demonstrates that, in the whisker representation of
rat cortex, precise timing of early spikes increases the information
transmitted about stimulus location by an average of 44 percent beyond that
transmitted only by the number of spikes.
This result stands in contrast to that observed in the coding of grating
orientation by the V1 complex cells.