High-order spikes correlations in neuronal activity and information geometry

PORTESI, M.; MONTANI, F.; PHOKA, E.; SCHULTZ, S.R.

Nara

Workshop; International Workshop on Anomalous Statistics, Generalized Entropies, and Information Geometry; 2012

Nara Women's University

We consider the spiking activity of very large neuronal ensembles to investigate how noise correlation is processed in the brain. Within the information geometry framework, we develop a statistical model to quantify the degree of the correlation in a pool of neurons. More specifically, we make use of the extended central limit theorem to consider all possible contributions, higher than two, in the spike correlations. This allows us, trough the identification of a deformation parameter, to deal with the problem of correlations in a pool of neurons in the thermodynamic limit. We estimate the probability distribution of firing and apply our formalism to a data set obtained from mouse barrel cortex.