Editor's Summary

6 September 2007

Precision in vision

In mammalian visual system, spikes evoked by visual stimuli have millisecond-scale timing even though the relevant timescales of visual processing themselves are much slower. It has therefore long been debated whether spike timing itself carries some form of the neural code. Now experiments in the lateral geniculate nucleus of cats, the part of the brain that is the primary processor of visual information, show that spike timing precision is not absolute for all classes of visual stimuli. Rather, the degree of precision is relative to the timescale of the stimulus, and this relatively high level of precision is required to construct an accurate representation of the stimulus.

Letter: Temporal precision in the neural code and the timescales of natural vision

Daniel A. Butts, Chong Weng, Jianzhong Jin, Chun-I Yeh, Nicholas A. Lesica, Jose-Manuel Alonso & Garrett B. Stanley

doi:10.1038/nature06105

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