Abstract

Our main interest is the question of how neural ensemble activity represents sensory stimuli. In this paper we discuss a new approach to characterizing neural coding schemes. It attempts to describe the specific stimulus parameters encoded in the neural ensemble activity and at the same time determines the nature of the neural symbols with which that information is encoded. This recently developed approach for the analysis of neural coding [7, 9] minimizes an intrinsic information-theoretic cost function (the information distortion) to produce a simple approximation of a coding scheme, which can be refined as more data becomes available. We study this optimization problem. The admissible

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