Information in the first spike, the order of spikes, and the number of spikes provided by neurons in the inferior temporal visual cortex.

Information theoretic analyses showed that for single inferior temporal neurons and neuronal populations, more information was encoded in 20 or more ms by all the spikes available than just by the first spike in the same time window about which of 20 objects or faces was shown. Further, the temporal order in which the first spike arrived from different simultaneously recorded neurons did not encode more information than was present in the first spike or the spike counts. Thus information transmission in the inferior temporal cortex by the number of spikes in even short time windows is fast, and provides more information than only the first spike, or the spike order from different neurons.