Nature Neuroscience
1, 501 - 507 (1998)
doi:10.1038/2217
Coding of visual information by precisely correlated spikes in the lateral
geniculate nucleusYang Dan1, 2, 3, Jose-Manuel Alonso2, W. Martin Usrey1, 2
& R. Clay Reid1, 21
Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA
2
Laboratory of Neurobiology, The Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021, USA
3
Present address: Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA
Correspondence should be addressed to R. Clay Reid clay_reid@hms.harvard.eduCorrelated firing among neurons is widespread in the nervous system. Precisely
correlated spiking, occurring on a millisecond time scale, has recently been
observed among neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus with overlapping
receptive fields. We have used an information-theoretic analysis to examine
the role of these correlations in visual coding. Considerably more information
can be extracted from two cells if temporal correlations between them are
considered. The percentage increase in information depends on the degree of
correlation; the average increase is approximately 20% for strongly correlated
pairs. Thus, precise temporal correlation could be used as an additional information
channel from thalamus to visual cortex.
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