A Subjective Distance Between Stimuli: Quantifying the Metric Structure of Representations

OLIVA, SAMENGO,LUETBEG,MIZUMORI

NEURAL COMPUTATION

Año: 2005 p. 969 - 990

0899-7667

As subjects perceive the sensory world, different stimuli elicit a numberof neural representations. Here, a subjective distance between stimuliis defined, measuring the degree of similarity between the underlyingrepresentations. As an example, the subjective distance between differentlocations in space is calculated from the activity of rodent’s hippocampalplace cells and lateral septal cells. Such a distance is compared to the realdistance between locations. As the number of sampled neurons increases,the subjective distance shows a tendency to resemble the metrics of realspace.