title: Information encoding in the inferior temporal visual cortex: contributions of the firing rates and the correlations between the firing of neurons.
abstract: The encoding of information by populations of neurons in the macaque inferior temporal cortex was analyzed using quantitative information-theoretic approaches. It was shown that almost all the information about which of 20 stimuli had been shown in a visual fixation task was present in the number of spikes emitted by each neuron, with stimulus-dependent cross-correlation effects adding for most sets of simultaneously recorded neurons almost no additional information. It was also found that the redundancy between the simultaneously recorded neurons was low, approximately 4% to 10%. Consistent with this, a decoding procedure applied to a population of neurons showed that the information increases approximately linearly with the number of cells in the population.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK. Edmund.Rolls@psy.ox.ac.uk
authors.forename: Edmund T
authors.initials: ET
authors.lastname: Rolls
authors.forename: Nikolaos C
authors.initials: NC
authors.lastname: Aggelopoulos
authors.forename: Leonardo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Franco
authors.forename: Alessandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Treves
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D008253:Macaca mulatta; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*