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The Journal of Neuroscience, July 15, 2000, 20(14):5392-5400
Temporal Coding of Visual Information in the Thalamus
Pamela
Reinagel and
R. Clay
Reid
Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston,
Massachusetts 02115
The amount of information a sensory neuron carries about a stimulus
is directly related to response reliability. We recorded from
individual neurons in the cat lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) while
presenting randomly modulated visual stimuli. The responses to repeated
stimuli were reproducible, whereas the responses evoked by nonrepeated
stimuli drawn from the same ensemble were variable. Stimulus-dependent
information was quantified directly from the difference in entropy of
these neural responses. We show that a single LGN cell can encode much
more visual information than had been demonstrated previously, ranging
from 15 to 102 bits/sec across our sample of cells. Information rate
was correlated with the firing rate of the cell, for a consistent rate
of 3.6 ± 0.6 bits/spike (mean ± SD). This information can
primarily be attributed to the high temporal precision with
which firing probability is modulated; many individual spikes were
timed with better than 1 msec precision. We introduce a way to estimate
the amount of information encoded in temporal patterns of firing, as
distinct from the information in the time varying firing rate at any
temporal resolution. Using this method, we find that temporal patterns sometimes introduce redundancy but often encode visual information. The
contribution of temporal patterns ranged from  3.4 to +25.5 bits/sec
or from 9.4 to +24.9% of the total information content of the responses.
Key words:
LGN; neural coding; information theory; entropy; white
noise; reliability; variability
Copyright © 2000 Society for Neuroscience 0270-6474/00/20145392-09$05.00/0
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