Timescales of multineuronal activity patterns reflect temporal structure of visual stimuli

  • The investigation of distributed coding across multiple neurons in the cortex remains to this date a challenge. Our current understanding of collective encoding of information and the relevant timescales is still limited. Most results are restricted to disparate timescales, focused on either very fast, e.g., spike-synchrony, or slow timescales, e.g., firing rate. Here, we investigated systematically multineuronal activity patterns evolving on different timescales, spanning the whole range from spike-synchrony to mean firing rate. Using multi-electrode recordings from cat visual cortex, we show that cortical responses can be described as trajectories in a high-dimensional pattern space. Patterns evolve on a continuum of coexisting timescales that strongly relate to the temporal properties of stimuli. Timescales consistent with the time constants of neuronal membranes and fast synaptic transmission (5–20 ms) play a particularly salient role in encoding a large amount of stimulus-related information. Thus, to faithfully encode the properties of visual stimuli the brain engages multiple neurons into activity patterns evolving on multiple timescales.

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Metadaten
Author:Ovidiu Florin Jurjut, Danko NikolićORCiDGND, Wolf SingerORCiDGND, Shan Yu, Martha Nari Havenith, Raul C. Mureşan
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-99320
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016758
ISSN:1932-6203
Parent Title (English):PLoS One
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2011/02/08
Date of first Publication:2011/02/08
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2011/04/14
Volume:6
Issue:(2): e16758
Note:
Copyright Jurjuţ et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Source:PLoS ONE 6(2): e16758. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016758
HeBIS-PPN:245447377
Institutes:Wissenschaftliche Zentren und koordinierte Programme / Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS)
Dewey Decimal Classification:6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 61 Medizin und Gesundheit / 610 Medizin und Gesundheit
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung 3.0