title: Local active information storage as a tool to understand distributed neural information processing.
abstract: Every act of information processing can in principle be decomposed into the component operations of information storage, transfer, and modification. Yet, while this is easily done for today's digital computers, the application of these concepts to neural information processing was hampered by the lack of proper mathematical definitions of these operations on information. Recently, definitions were given for the dynamics of these information processing operations on a local scale in space and time in a distributed system, and the specific concept of local active information storage was successfully applied to the analysis and optimization of artificial neural systems. However, no attempt to measure the space-time dynamics of local active information storage in neural data has been made to date. Here we measure local active information storage on a local scale in time and space in voltage sensitive dye imaging data from area 18 of the cat. We show that storage reflects neural properties such as stimulus preferences and surprise upon unexpected stimulus change, and in area 18 reflects the abstract concept of an ongoing stimulus despite the locally random nature of this stimulus. We suggest that LAIS will be a useful quantity to test theories of cortical function, such as predictive coding.
authors: MEG Unit, Brain Imaging Center, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
authors: Michael
authors: M
authors: Wibral
authors: CSIRO Computational Informatics Marsfield, NSW, Australia.
authors: Joseph T
authors: JT
authors: Lizier
authors: Fakultät für Biologie, Technische Universtät Darmstadt, Germany.
authors: Sebastian
authors: S
authors: Vögler
authors: Department of Nonlinear Dynamics, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization Göttingen, Germany.
authors: Viola
authors: V
authors: Priesemann
authors: Fakultät für Biologie, Technische Universtät Darmstadt, Germany.
authors: Ralf
authors: R
authors: Galuske
keywords: complex systems; distributed computation; information storage; local information dynamics; neural dynamics; predictive coding; visual system; voltage sensitive dye imaging