Publication Date:
1997-03-21
Description:
To provide information about dynamic sensory stimuli, the pattern of action potentials in spiking neurons must be variable. To ensure reliability these variations must be related, reproducibly, to the stimulus. For H1, a motion-sensitive neuron in the fly's visual system, constant-velocity motion produces irregular spike firing patterns, and spike counts typically have a variance comparable to the mean, for cells in the mammalian cortex. But more natural, time-dependent input signals yield patterns of spikes that are much more reproducible, both in terms of timing and of counting precision. Variability and reproducibility are quantified with ideas from information theory, and measured spike sequences in H1 carry more than twice the amount of information they would if they followed the variance-mean relation seen with constant inputs. Thus, models that may accurately account for the neural response to static stimuli can significantly underestimate the reliability of signal transfer under more natural conditions.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉de Ruyter van Steveninck, R R -- Lewen, G D -- Strong, S P -- Koberle, R -- Bialek, W -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1997 Mar 21;275(5307):1805-8.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9065407" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Action Potentials
;
Animals
;
Diptera/*physiology
;
Motion Perception
;
Neurons, Afferent/*physiology
;
Photic Stimulation
;
Visual Pathways/physiology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
Permalink
