Neuronal code

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Author: Dr. Peter Cariani, Dept. of Otology & Laryngology, Harvard Medical School
Author: Dr. Eugene M. Izhikevich, The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, California

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This article will briefly cover:

1. Outline of the neural coding problem
   1. Functionalist conceptions -- relation to specific informational functions (e.g. perceptual discrimination, action selection/implementation)
   2. Information-theoretic conceptions -- Shannonian informational content vis-a-vis signals or actions (stimulus reconstruction from spike data)
2. Basic requirements for a neural code
   1. Encoding of signal type (e.g. neuronal information subserving pitch)
   2. Encoding of signal value (e.g. specific pitch frequency)
   3. Capable of being decoded in a coherent way
   4. Evaluation of candidate codes (e.g. effective retrodiction of percept or action based on spike data and coding assumptions; role of informational adequency in eliminating candidate codes, issue of whether optimality per se constitutes positive evidence for a code)
3. A taxonomy of possible pulse codes
   1. Channel-based codes
   2. Temporal pattern codes
   3. Spike Latency codes
   4. Other kinds of codes (e.g. rate or latency variance, higher-order statistics, ordinal and sequence codes)
4. A table listing evidence for candidate codes
5. General observations (neural codes, signal multiplexing, and multimodal integration)
6. Relation of codes to neural processing architectures (codes & computational architectures mutually determined)
7. Conclusions

Invited by:

Dr. Eugene M. Izhikevich, Editor-in-Chief of Scholarpedia, the free peer reviewed encyclopedia