title: How well can we estimate the information carried in neuronal responses from limited samples?
abstract: It is difficult to extract the information carried by neuronal responses about a set of stimuli because limited data samples result in biased estimates. Recently two improved procedures have been developed to calculate information from experimental results: a binning-and-correcting procedure and a neural network procedure. We have used data produced from a model of the spatiotemporal receptive fields of parvocellular and magnocellular lateral geniculate neurons to study the performance of these methods as a function of the number of trials used. Both procedures yield accurate results for one-dimensional neuronal codes. They can also be used to produce a reasonable estimate of the extra information in a three-dimensional code, in this instance, within 0.05-0.1 bit of the asymptotically calculated value--about 10% of the total transmitted information. We believe that this performance is much more accurate than previous procedures.
authors.affiliation: Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Golomb
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hertz
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Panzeri
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Treves
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Richmond
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D008959:Models, Neurological; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D016012:Poisson Distribution