▪ Abstract It has long been assumed that sensory neurons are adapted, through both
evolutionary and developmental processes, to the statistical properties of the signals to …

Understanding the functional role of neurons and neural systems is a primary goal of
systems neuroscience. A longstanding hypothesis states that sensory systems are matched …

Although the Shannon mutual information can be used to reveal general features of the
neural code, it cannot directly address which symbols of the code are significant. Further …

The relative efficiency of any particular image-coding scheme should be defined only in
relation to the class of images that the code is likely to encounter. To understand the …

Neural populations encode information about their stimulus in a collective fashion, by joint
activity patterns of spiking and silence. A full account of this mapping from stimulus to neural …

Understanding how populations of neurons encode information is the challenge faced by
researchers in the field of neural coding. Focusing on the many mysteries and marvels of the …

Highlights•Correlations re-distribute the noise in the neural population-
response.•Information is limited when signal and correlated noise overlap.•Heterogeneity …

There are two basic problems in the statistical analysis of neural data. The “encoding”
problem concerns how information is encoded in neural spike trains: can we predict the …

Why does the mammalian visual system represent information as it does? If we assume that
visual systems have evolved to cope with the natural environment then we might expect the …

What does the response of a neuron, or of a group of neurons mean? What does it say about
the stimulus? How distributed and efficient is the encoding of information in population …