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Science 28 June 1991:
Vol. 252. no. 5014, pp. 1854 - 1857
DOI: 10.1126/science.2063199
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Articles

Science, Vol 252, Issue 5014, 1854-1857
Copyright © 1991 by American Association for the Advancement of Science

articles

Reading a neural code

W Bialek, F Rieke, RR de Ruyter van Steveninck, and D Warland

Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley 94720.

Traditional approaches to neural coding characterize the encoding of known stimuli in average neural responses. Organisms face nearly the opposite task--extracting information about an unknown time-dependent stimulus from short segments of a spike train. Here the neural code was characterized from the point of view of the organism, culminating in algorithms for real-time stimulus estimation based on a single example of the spike train. These methods were applied to an identified movement-sensitive neuron in the fly visual system. Such decoding experiments determined the effective noise level and fault tolerance of neural computation, and the structure of the decoding algorithms suggested a simple model for real-time analog signal processing with spiking neurons.


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Stimulus-Dependent Modulation of Spike Burst Length in Cat Striate Cortical Cells.
B. C. Debusk, E. J. Debruyn, R. K. Snider, J. F. Kabara, and A. B. Bonds (1997)
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Encoding of Visual Motion Information and Reliability in Spiking and Graded Potential Neurons.
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The structure and precision of retinal spike trains.
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PNAS 94, 5411-5416
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Response Variability and Timing Precision of Neuronal Spike Trains In Vivo.
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Effects of Adaptation on Neural Coding by Primary Sensory Interneurons in the Cricket Cercal System.
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How big is human memory, or on being just useful enough..
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Neural Processing of Naturalistic Optic Flow.
R. Kern, C. Petereit, and M. Egelhaaf (2001)
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