PBIO SEMINAR SERIES

Tuned transfer of neural correlation and consequences for coding

Wednesday - February 06, 2008
07-08 SEMINAR SERIES

Eric Shea-Brown
University of Washington
Speaker's website

Host: Adrienne Fairhall

Correlations among neural spike times are ubiquitous, and questions of how these correlations develop, and of the impact they have on the neural code, have become central in neuroscience. We address this aspect: if correlations arise from common inputs to different neurons, how do they depend on the cells' operating range -- their rate and regularity of spiking? We use linear response calculations, simulations, and in vitro experiments to show that correlations between pairs of neurons vary sharply with their firing rates. We then illustrate the consequences via Fisher information, which quantifies the accuracy of encoding. This is joint work with Jaime de la Rocha, Brent Doiron, Kreso Josic, and Alex Reyes.