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Published on: March 2, 2015
The neuronal encoding of information in the brain
Edmund T Rolls1, Alessandro Treves
1Oxford Centre for Computational Neuroscience, Oxford, UK.
Progress in Neurobiology
|September 13, 2011
Summary
Neurons primarily encode information using their firing rates, a robust and rapid method. Temporal coding and spike timing offer minimal additional information for neural processing in the primate cortex.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Computational Neuroscience
- Information Theory
Background:
- The neural code, the mechanism by which neurons represent information, is fundamental to understanding brain function.
- Previous research has explored various aspects of neural encoding, but a comprehensive quantitative analysis across multiple cortical areas is needed.
Purpose of the Study:
- To perform quantitative information theoretic analyses of neural encoding in primate sensory and associative cortices.
- To determine the primary mechanisms of neural information representation and processing.
Main Methods:
- Quantitative information theoretic analyses were applied to neural recordings from primate visual, olfactory, taste, hippocampal, and orbitofrontal cortex.
- The study focused on analyzing firing rates, spike timing, and neuronal synchrony.
Main Results:
- Neural information is predominantly encoded by neuronal firing rates (number of spikes in a short time window).
- This firing rate code is robust, nearly independent for small neuronal populations, and allows for rapid information readout (as fast as 20 ms).
- Temporal coding, including stimulus-dependent synchronization and precise spike timing, provides limited additional information. Feature binding is achieved through feature combination neurons, not temporal synchrony.
Conclusions:
- Neuronal firing rate is the primary and efficient code for neural information representation in the studied primate cortical areas.
- The neural code is sparse, distributed, and compatible with biologically plausible synaptic integration (dot product decoding).
- Understanding this neural code is crucial for comprehending both information representation and processing in the cortex.
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