Stimuli discrimination measure of correlations in a population of neurons by Jensen-Shannon Divergence

F. MONTANI, O. A. ROSSO, S. R. SCHULTZ

Mar del Plata, Argentina

Conferencia; XV Conference on Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics and Nonlinear Physics; 2006

The significance of synchronized spikes fired by nearby neurons correlation for perception is still not clear. To evaluate the effect of correlation on the population coding of sensory information, we used recorded responses of pairs of single neurons in primary visual cortex of macaque monkey (V1) to stimuli of varying orientation. Both trial-to-trial variability and synchrony were found to depend on both stimulus and orientation. We used the Jensen-Shannon Divergence for fixed stimuli as a measure of discrimination between a pairs of correlated cells VI. The Jensen-Shannon divergence, can be consider as a distance between the corresponding probability distribution function associated with each spikes fired observed patterns. The Nemenman-Shafee-Bialek estimator was used in our entropy estimation in order to remove all possible bias deviation from our calculations. We found that the relative Jensen-Shannon Divergence (measured in relation to case in which all cell fired completely independently) decreases with respect to the difference in orientation preference between the receptive field from each pair of cells. Our finding indicates that the Jensen-Shannon Divergence may be used for characterizing the circuitry network in a population of neurons.