Averbeck Bruno B, Latham Peter E, Pouget Alexandre
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
Nat Rev Neurosci. 2006 May;7(5):358-66. doi: 10.1038/nrn1888.
How the brain encodes information in population activity, and how it combines and manipulates that activity as it carries out computations, are questions that lie at the heart of systems neuroscience. During the past decade, with the advent of multi-electrode recording and improved theoretical models, these questions have begun to yield answers. However, a complete understanding of neuronal variability, and, in particular, how it affects population codes, is missing. This is because variability in the brain is typically correlated, and although the exact effects of these correlations are not known, it is known that they can be large. Here, we review studies that address the interaction between neuronal noise and population codes, and discuss their implications for population coding in general.
大脑如何在群体活动中编码信息，以及在执行计算时如何组合和操纵这种活动，是系统神经科学的核心问题。在过去十年中，随着多电极记录技术的出现和理论模型的改进，这些问题开始得到解答。然而，对于神经元变异性，尤其是其如何影响群体编码，仍缺乏全面的理解。这是因为大脑中的变异性通常是相关的，尽管这些相关性的确切影响尚不清楚，但已知其影响可能很大。在此，我们回顾了探讨神经元噪声与群体编码之间相互作用的研究，并讨论它们对一般群体编码的意义。
