Detection of syntonies between multiple spike trains using a coarse-grain binarization of spike count distributions.

At very short timescales neuronal spike trains may be compared to binary streams where each neuron gives at most one spike per bin and therefore its state can be described by a binary variable. Time-averaged activity like the mean firing rate can be generally used on longer timescales to describe the dynamics; nevertheless, enlarging the space of the possible states up to the continuum may seriously bias the true statistics if the sampling is not accurate. We propose a simple transformation on binary variables which allows us to fix the dimensionality of the space to sample and to vary the temporal resolution of the analysis. For each time length interactions among simultaneously recorded neurons are evaluated using log-linear models. We illustrate how to use this method by analysing two different sets of data, recorded respectively in the temporal cortex of freely moving rats and in the inferotemporal cortex of behaving monkeys engaged in a visual fixation task. A detailed study of the interactions is provided for both samples. In both datasets we find that some assemblies share robust interactions, invariant at different time lengths, while others cooperate only at delimited time resolutions, yet the size of the samples is too small to allow an unbiased estimate of all possible interactions. We conclude that an extensive application of our method to larger samples of data, together with the development of techniques to correct the bias in the estimate of the coefficients, would provide significant information about the structure of the interactions in populations of neurons.

Replica-free evaluation of the neuronal population information with mixed continuous and discrete stimuli: from the linear to the asymptotic regime.

Recent studies have explored theoretically the ability of populations of neurons to carry information about a set of stimuli, both in the case of purely discrete or purely continuous stimuli, and in the case of multidimensional continuous angular and discrete correlates, in the presence of additional quenched disorder in the distribution. An analytical expression for the mutual information has been obtained in the limit of large noise by means of the replica trick. Here, we show that the same results can actually be obtained in most cases without the use of replicas, by means of a much simpler expansion of the logarithm. Fitting the theoretical model to real neuronal data, we show that the introduction of correlations in the quenched disorder improves the fit, suggesting a possible role of signal correlations-actually detected in real data-in a redundant code. We show that even in the more difficult analysis of the asymptotic regime, an explicit expression for the mutual information can be obtained without resorting to the replica trick despite the presence of quenched disorder, both with a Gaussian and with a more realistic thresholded-Gaussian model. When the stimuli are mixed continuous and discrete, we find that with both models the information seem to grow logarithmically to infinity with the number of neurons and with the inverse of the noise, even though the exact general dependence cannot be derived explicitly for the thresholded-Gaussian model. In the large noise limit, lower values of information were obtained with the thresholded-Gaussian model, for a fixed value of the noise and of the population size. On the contrary, in the asymptotic regime, with very low values of the noise, a lower information value is obtained with the Gaussian model.

Replica symmetric evaluation of the information transfer in a two-layer network in the presence of continuous and discrete stimuli.

In a previous paper we have evaluated analytically the mutual information between the firing rates of N independent units and a set of multidimensional continuous and discrete stimuli, for a finite population size and in the limit of large noise. Here, we extend the analysis to the case of two interconnected populations, where input units activate output ones via Gaussian weights and a threshold linear transfer function. We evaluate the information carried by a population of M output units, again about continuous and discrete correlates. The mutual information is evaluated solving saddle-point equations under the assumption of replica symmetry, a method that, by taking into account only the term linear in N of the input information, is equivalent to assuming the noise to be large. Within this limitation, we analyze the dependence of the information on the ratio M/N, on the selectivity of the input units and on the level of the output noise. We show analytically, and confirm numerically, that in the limit of a linear transfer function and of a small ratio between output and input noise, the output information approaches asymptotically the information carried in input. Finally, we show that the information loss in output does not depend much on the structure of the stimulus, whether purely continuous, purely discrete or mixed, but only on the position of the threshold nonlinearity, and on the ratio between input and output noise.