TY - JOUR
T1 - A test of metabolically efficient coding in the retina
AU - Balasubramanian, Vijay
AU - Berry, Michael J.
N1 - Funding Information:
VB was supported initially by the Society of Fellows and the Milton Fund of Harvard University and later by DOE grant DOE-FG02-95ER40893. MB was supported by the Pew Charitable Trust and the E Mathilda Ziegler Foundation. VB is grateful to the ITP, Santa Barbara and the Aspen Centre for Physics for hospitality while this work was in progress. We are grateful to Don Kimber and Markus Meister for collaboration on previous work directly related to this article.
PY - 2002/11
Y1 - 2002/11
N2 - We tested the hypothesis that aspects of the neural code of retinal ganglion cells are optimized to transmit visual information at minimal metabolic cost. Under a broad ensemble of light patterns, ganglion cell spike trains consisted of sparse, precise bursts of spikes. These bursts were viewed as independent neural symbols. The noise in each burst was measured via repeated presentation of the visual stimulus, and the energy cost was estimated from the total charge flow during ganglion cell spiking. Given these costs and noise, the theory of efficient codes predicts an optimal distribution of symbol usage. Symbols that are either noisy or costly occur less frequently in this optimal code. We found good qualitative and quantitative agreement with the measured distribution of burst sizes for ganglion cells in the tiger salamander retina.
AB - We tested the hypothesis that aspects of the neural code of retinal ganglion cells are optimized to transmit visual information at minimal metabolic cost. Under a broad ensemble of light patterns, ganglion cell spike trains consisted of sparse, precise bursts of spikes. These bursts were viewed as independent neural symbols. The noise in each burst was measured via repeated presentation of the visual stimulus, and the energy cost was estimated from the total charge flow during ganglion cell spiking. Given these costs and noise, the theory of efficient codes predicts an optimal distribution of symbol usage. Symbols that are either noisy or costly occur less frequently in this optimal code. We found good qualitative and quantitative agreement with the measured distribution of burst sizes for ganglion cells in the tiger salamander retina.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0041917614&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1088/0954-898X_13_4_306
DO - 10.1088/0954-898X_13_4_306
M3 - Article
C2 - 12463343
AN - SCOPUS:0041917614
SN - 0954-898X
VL - 13
SP - 531
EP - 552
JO - Network: Computation in Neural Systems
JF - Network: Computation in Neural Systems
IS - 4
ER -