DeWeese, M. R., Wehr, M., Zador, A. M. (August 2003) Binary spiking in auditory cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 23 (21). pp. 7940-7949. ISSN 0270-6474
Abstract
Neurons are often assumed to operate in a highly unreliable manner: a neuron can signal the same stimulus with a variable number of action potentials. However, much of the experimental evidence supporting this view was obtained in the visual cortex. We have, therefore, assessed trial-to-trial variability in the auditory cortex of the rat. To ensure single-unit isolation, we used cell-attached recording. Tone-evoked responses were usually transient, often consisting of, on average, only a single spike per stimulus. Surprisingly, the majority of responses were not just transient, but were also binary, consisting of 0 or 1 action potentials, but not more, in response to each stimulus; several dramatic examples consisted of exactly one spike on 100% of trials, with no trial-to-trial variability in spike count. The variability of such binary responses differs from comparably transient responses recorded in visual cortical areas such as area MT, and represent the lowest trial-to-trial variability mathematically possible for responses of a given firing rate. Our study thus establishes for the first time that transient responses in auditory cortex can be described as a binary process, rather than as a highly variable Poisson process. These results demonstrate that cortical architecture can support a more precise control of spike number than was previously recognized, and they suggest a re-evaluation of models of cortical processing that assume noisiness to be an inevitable feature of cortical codes.
| Item Type: | Paper |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | auditory cortex Poisson spiking neural coding neural reliability neural computation cell-attached recording CORTICAL-NEURONS cortical neurons STRIATE CORTEX striate cortex RESPONSE VARIABILITY response variability VISUAL-CORTEX visual cortex SINGLE CELLS single cells STABLE PROPAGATION stable propagation RECEPTIVE-FIELDS receptive fields SPARSE CODE sparse code IN-VIVO in-vivo in vivo CAT cat |
| Subjects: | organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions > tissues types and functions > auditory cortex bioinformatics > computational biology organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions > cell types and functions > cell types > neurons organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions > cell types and functions > cell types > neurons organs, tissues, organelles, cell types and functions > cell types and functions > cell types > neurons organism description > animal > mammal > rodent > rat organism description > animal > mammal > rodent > rat |
| CSHL Authors: | |
| Communities: | CSHL labs > Zador lab |
| Depositing User: | Leigh Johnson |
| Date: | August 2003 |
| Date Deposited: | 28 Mar 2012 19:03 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Feb 2017 20:48 |
| Related URLs: | |
| URI: | https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/25617 |
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