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Figure 1 | BMC Neuroscience

Figure 1

From: Where are the most informative neurons?

Figure 1

Reinterpreting experimental observations. (A) A single neuron's performance (expressed as discriminability, d i ′ ) to a discrimination task (± 3° motion discrimination) is typically expressed as a function of a neuron's tuned position (expressed as the offset Δ i from the stimulus). Although the dataset here is synthetic, it is based on empirical values [2, 3]. Notably in both cases, the data are highly variable: the median (red curve) both peaked near 70° but the central tendency is weak. (B) Rescaling a neuron's position by its own tuning width Δ ∼ i : = Δ i / σ i reduces variation in two ways: a stronger central tendency along the x-axis, and substantially reduced variability along the y-axis. The red curve is the running average of 20 successive data points. (C) Variability with this same dataset is further reduced if d i ′ is also scaled as D ′ := d i ′ ⋅ σ i . All plots are based on the same 620 neurons. Offsets Δ i are uniformly sampled from 0 to 100° in 5° increments with 30 repeats. Tuning widths are sampled from a Gaussian distribution (mean = 47°; standard deviation = 27°). A Poisson random number generator produced the spike count.

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