Neuronal selectivity, population sparseness, and ergodicity in the inferior temporal visual cortex

Abstract Thesparsenessoftheencodingofstimulibysingle neurons and by populations of neurons is fundamental to understanding the efficiency and capacity of representations in the brain, and was addressed as follows. The selectivity and sparseness of firing to visual stimuli of single neurons in the primate inferior temporal visual cortex were measured to a set of 20 visual stimuli including objects and faces in macaques performing a visual fixation task. Neurons were analysed with significantly different responses to the stimuli. The firing rate distribution of 36% of the neurons was exponential. Twenty-nine percent of the neurons had too few low rates to be fitted by an exponential distribution, and were fitted by a gamma distribution. Interestingly, the raw firing rate distribution taken across all neurons fitted an exponential distribution very closely. The sparseness as or selectivity of the representation of the set of 20 stimuli provided by each

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: BC
• Authors: Leonardo Franco, Edmund T. Rolls, Nikolaos C. Aggelopoulos, José M. Jerez
• Keywords: Abstract Thesparsenessoftheencodingofstimulibysingle Neurons, BC 2007, Neurons, Visual Stimuli