Population coding by electrosensory neurons.

@article{citeulike:2970664, abstract = {Sensory stimuli typically activate many receptors at once and therefore should lead to increases in correlated activity among central neurons. Such correlated activity could be a critical feature in the encoding and decoding of information in central circuits. Here we characterize correlated activity in response to two biologically relevant classes of sensory stimuli in the primary electrosensory nuclei, the electrosensory lateral line lobe, of the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus. Our results show that these neurons can display significant correlations in their baseline activities that depend on the amount of receptive field overlap. A detailed analysis of spike trains revealed that correlated activity resulted predominantly from a tendency to fire synchronous or anti-synchronous bursts of spikes. We also explored how different stimulation protocols affected correlated activity: while prey-like stimuli increased correlated activity, conspecific-like stimuli decreased correlated activity. We also computed the correlations between the variabilities of each neuron to repeated presentations of the same stimulus (noise correlations) and found lower amounts of noise correlation for communication stimuli. Therefore the decrease in correlated activity seen with communication stimuli is caused at least in part by reduced noise correlations. This differential modulation in correlated activity occurred because of changes in burst firing at the individual neuron level. Our results show that different categories of behaviorally relevant input will differentially affect correlated activity. In particular, we show that the number of correlated bursts within a given time window could be used by postsynaptic neurons to distinguish between both stimulus categories.}, address = {Department of Zoology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA.}, author = {Chacron, M. J. and Bastian, J. }, citeulike-article-id = {2970664}, doi = {10.1152/jn.01266.2007}, issn = {0022-3077}, journal = {Journal of neurophysiology}, keywords = {correlation, electrosensory\_organ, neural\_coding, population\_code, sensory\_system}, month = {April}, number = {4}, pages = {1825--1835}, posted-at = {2008-07-07 18:45:33}, priority = {2}, title = {Population coding by electrosensory neurons.}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.01266.2007}, volume = {99}, year = {2008} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:2970664 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2970664 TI - Population coding by electrosensory neurons. JF - Journal of neurophysiology VL - 99 IS - 4 SP - 1825 EP - 1835 AD - Department of Zoology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA. SN - 0022-3077 N2 - Sensory stimuli typically activate many receptors at once and therefore should lead to increases in correlated activity among central neurons. Such correlated activity could be a critical feature in the encoding and decoding of information in central circuits. Here we characterize correlated activity in response to two biologically relevant classes of sensory stimuli in the primary electrosensory nuclei, the electrosensory lateral line lobe, of the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus. Our results show that these neurons can display significant correlations in their baseline activities that depend on the amount of receptive field overlap. A detailed analysis of spike trains revealed that correlated activity resulted predominantly from a tendency to fire synchronous or anti-synchronous bursts of spikes. We also explored how different stimulation protocols affected correlated activity: while prey-like stimuli increased correlated activity, conspecific-like stimuli decreased correlated activity. We also computed the correlations between the variabilities of each neuron to repeated presentations of the same stimulus (noise correlations) and found lower amounts of noise correlation for communication stimuli. Therefore the decrease in correlated activity seen with communication stimuli is caused at least in part by reduced noise correlations. This differential modulation in correlated activity occurred because of changes in burst firing at the individual neuron level. Our results show that different categories of behaviorally relevant input will differentially affect correlated activity. In particular, we show that the number of correlated bursts within a given time window could be used by postsynaptic neurons to distinguish between both stimulus categories. KW - correlation KW - electrosensory_organ KW - neural_coding KW - population_code KW - sensory_system AU - Chacron, MJ AU - Bastian, J PY - 2008/04// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.01266.2007 ER -