E13 Neural coding

Title

Neural coding studies how information about a stimulus or external variable is represented in activity patterns of one or more neurons. The instantaneous firing rate summarizes a train of discrete action potentials into a continuous variable, while information theory tools (entropy, mutual information) generally quantify how much uncertainty about the stimulus is reduced by observing the neural response, without assuming a specific coding mechanism. Many sensory neurons show bell-shaped tuning curves with respect to a stimulus variable, and the coefficient of variation of the interfiring intervals (ISI) quantifies how regular or irregular the temporal firing pattern is. At the population level, the stimulus can be reconstructed by optimal linear decoding or by the population vector method, which weights the contribution of each neuron according to its tuning preference and its instantaneous firing rate.

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