Abstract
In the sensory systems, most neurons’ firing rates are tuned to at least one aspect of the stimulus. Other neurons are untuned, meaning that their firing rates appear not to depend on the stimulus. Previous work on information coding in neural populations has ignored the untuned neurons, based on the tacit assumption that they are unimportant. Using theoretical calculations and analyses of in vivo neural data, I show that untuned neurons can contribute significantly to the population code. Ignoring untuned neurons can lead to severe underestimates of the amount of stimulus information encoded, and in some cases population codes can be made more informative by replacing tuned neurons with untuned ones.
Copyright
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