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Efficient Population Coding

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Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience

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Synonyms

Coding accuracy of neural populations; Coding efficiency of neural populations; Information transmission by neural populations

Definition

Natural stimulations caused by objects in the surrounding world do not stimulate single sensory receptors in isolation but lead to the activation of large numbers of neurons simultaneously. Thus, typical stimulus variables of interest are represented only implicitly in activation patterns across large neural populations. These patterns are statistical in nature since repeated presentation of the same stimulus usually leads to highly variable responses. The large dimensionality and randomness of the neural responses make it difficult to assess how well different stimuli can be discriminated. Depending on how effectively neurons share the labor of encoding, the accuracy with which stimuli are represented can change dramatically. Thus, studying the efficiency of population codes is important for our understanding of both which information is...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, University of Tübingen and Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany

    Matthias Bethge

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  1. Matthias Bethge
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matthias Bethge .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Dieter Jaeger

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA

    Ranu Jung

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Bethge, M. (2014). Efficient Population Coding. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_578-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_578-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7320-6

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