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Inspiration for artificial biologically inspired computing is often drawn from neural systems. This article shows how to analyze neural systems using information theory with the aim of obtaining constraints that help to identify the algorithms run by neural systems and the information they represent. Algorithms and representations identified this way may then guide the design of biologically inspired computing systems. The material covered includes the necessary introduction to information theory and to the estimation of information-theoretic quantities from neural recordings. We then show how to analyze the information encoded in a system about its environment, and also discuss recent methodological developments on the question of how much information each agent carries about the environment either uniquely or redundantly or synergistically together with others. Last, we introduce the framework of local information dynamics, where information processing is partitioned into component processes of information storage, transfer, and modification – locally in space and time. We close by discussing example applications of these measures to neural data and other complex systems.
Local active information storage as a tool to understand distributed neural information processing
(2014)
Every act of information processing can in principle be decomposed into the component operations of information storage, transfer, and modification. Yet, while this is easily done for today's digital computers, the application of these concepts to neural information processing was hampered by the lack of proper mathematical definitions of these operations on information. Recently, definitions were given for the dynamics of these information processing operations on a local scale in space and time in a distributed system, and the specific concept of local active information storage was successfully applied to the analysis and optimization of artificial neural systems. However, no attempt to measure the space-time dynamics of local active information storage in neural data has been made to date. Here we measure local active information storage on a local scale in time and space in voltage sensitive dye imaging data from area 18 of the cat. We show that storage reflects neural properties such as stimulus preferences and surprise upon unexpected stimulus change, and in area 18 reflects the abstract concept of an ongoing stimulus despite the locally random nature of this stimulus. We suggest that LAIS will be a useful quantity to test theories of cortical function, such as predictive coding.