Efficient information transfer by Poisson neurons

Lubomir  Kostal; Shigeru Shinomoto

doi:10.3934/mbe.2016004

Article Contents

2016, Volume 13, Issue 3: 509-520. Doi: 10.3934/mbe.2016004

This issue Previous Article Successive spike times predicted by a stochastic neuronal model with a variable input signal Next Article Integrator or coincidence detector --- what shapes the relation of stimulus synchrony and the operational mode of a neuron?

Efficient information transfer by Poisson neurons

Lubomir Kostal^1, and
Shigeru Shinomoto^2,

1.
Institute of Physiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Videnska 1083, 14220 Prague 4
2.
Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502

Received: February 28, 2015

Revised: July 31, 2015

Published: December 2015

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Abstract

Recently, it has been suggested that certain neurons with Poissonian spiking statistics may communicate by discontinuously switching between two levels of firing intensity. Such a situation resembles in many ways the optimal information transmission protocol for the continuous-time Poisson channel known from information theory. In this contribution we employ the classical information-theoretic results to analyze the efficiency of such a transmission from different perspectives, emphasising the neurobiological viewpoint. We address both the ultimate limits, in terms of the information capacity under metabolic cost constraints, and the achievable bounds on performance at rates below capacity with fixed decoding error probability. In doing so we discuss optimal values of experimentally measurable quantities that can be compared with the actual neuronal recordings in a future effort.

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Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary: 62B10, 62P10; Secondary: 60G55.

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