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Science 21 March 1997:
Vol. 275. no. 5307, pp. 1805 - 1808
DOI: 10.1126/science.275.5307.1805
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Reproducibility and Variability in Neural Spike Trains

Rob R. de Ruyter van Steveninck, Geoffrey D. Lewen, Steven P. Strong, * Roland Koberle, † William Bialek

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.

R. R. de Ruyter van Steveninck, G. D. Lewen, S. P. Strong, W. Bialek, NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
R. Koberle, Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, and NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
*   Present address: School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Olden Lane, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.

†   Present address: Instituto de Física e Química de São Carlos (IFQSC), Universidade de São Paolo, 13560 São Carlos SP, Brazil.

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