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Updated: Apr 18, 2026

Concurrent EEG and Functional MRI Recording and Integration Analysis for Dynamic Cortical Activity Imaging
Published on: June 30, 2018
Correlated activity supports efficient cortical processing
Chou P Hung1, Ding Cui2, Yueh-Peng Chen3
1Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University Washington, D.C., USA ; Institute of Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University Taipei, Taiwan.
Abstract:
Visual recognition is a computational challenge that is thought to occur via efficient coding. An important concept is sparseness, a measure of coding efficiency. The prevailing view is that sparseness supports efficiency by minimizing redundancy and correlations in spiking populations. Yet, we recently reported that "choristers", neurons that behave more similarly (have correlated stimulus preferences and spontaneous coincident spiking), carry more generalizable object information than uncorrelated neurons ("soloists") in macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex. The rarity of choristers (as low as 6% of IT neurons) indicates that they were likely missed in previous studies. Here, we report that correlation strength is distinct from sparseness (choristers are not simply broadly tuned neurons), that choristers are located in non-granular output layers, and that correlated activity predicts human visual search efficiency. These counterintuitive results suggest that a redundant correlational structure supports efficient processing and behavior.
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