Spike timing and the coding of naturalistic sounds in a central auditory area of songbirds

Details Spike timing and the coding of naturalistic sounds in a central auditory area of songbirds Spike timing and the coding of naturalistic sounds in a central auditory area of songbirds

2002-01-12

arxiv.org/abs/physics/0201027v1

Physics

Biological Physics

9 pages, 3 figures, LaTeX, to be published in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14

Scientific paper

In nature, animals encounter high dimensional sensory stimuli that have complex statistical and dynamical structure. Attempts to study the neural coding of these natural signals face challenges both in the selection of the signal ensemble and in the analysis of the resulting neural responses. For zebra finches, naturalistic stimuli can be defined as sounds that they encounter in a colony of conspecific birds. We assembled an ensemble of these sounds by recording groups of 10-40 zebra finches, and then analyzed the response of single neurons in the songbird central auditory area (field L) to continuous playback of long segments from this ensemble. Following methods developed in the fly visual system, we measured the information that spike trains provide about the acoustic stimulus without any assumptions about which features of the stimulus are relevant. Preliminary results indicate that large amounts of information are carried by spike timing, with roughly half of the information accessible only at time resolutions better than 10 ms; additional information is still being revealed as time resolution is improved to 2 ms. Information can be decomposed into that carried by the locking of individual spikes to the stimulus (or modulations of spike rate) vs. that carried by timing in spike patterns. Initial results show that in field L, temporal patterns give at least ~20% extra information. Thus, single central auditory neurons can provide an informative representation of naturalistic sounds, in which spike timing may play a significant role.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Spike timing and the coding of naturalistic sounds in a central auditory area of songbirds does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Spike timing and the coding of naturalistic sounds in a central auditory area of songbirds, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Spike timing and the coding of naturalistic sounds in a central auditory area of songbirds will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-725746