Keywords

Firing RateStimulus DurationPresentation RateRate CodeContinuous Response

Understanding the response properties of single neurons is seriously limited by the available experimental time and the rate [bit/s] at which information can be gained from the neurons. A substantial improvement in the latter can be achieved by speeding up the presentation of stimuli.

We show how the novel technique of Bayesian Binning [1] can be used to find the optimal stimulus presentation rate of a continuous sequence of stimuli.

This method applied to neurons in high-level visual cortical area STSa gives optimal presentation rates of approximately 56 ms/stimulus (18 stimuli/s) which is significantly faster than conventional presentation rates, allowing a better sampling of stimulus space. We relate these results to findings obtained with the Bayesian Bin Classification method [2, 3], which can be used to select the optimal time window for the analysis of the continuous response stream. Both methods will soon be freely available as standalone command-line applications or Matlab/Octave plugins.

The optimal window duration is equal to the stimulus duration near the best presentation rate. Interestingly, this duration also corresponds to the peak of spike efficiency [bit/spike] of a rate code whose firing rates match those found in visual neurons (area STSa).