Kostal Lubomir, Lansky Petr
Institute of Physiology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 14220 Prague 4, Czech Republic
Neural Comput. 2015 May;27(5):1051-7. doi: 10.1162/NECO_a_00724. Epub 2015 Feb 24.
It is automatically assumed that the accuracy with which a stimulus can be decoded is entirely determined by the properties of the neuronal system. We challenge this perspective by showing that the identification of pure tone intensities in an auditory nerve fiber depends on both the stochastic response model and the arbitrarily chosen stimulus units. We expose an apparently paradoxical situation in which it is impossible to decide whether loud or quiet tones are encoded more precisely. Our conclusion reaches beyond the topic of auditory neuroscience, however, as we show that the choice of stimulus scale is an integral part of the neural coding problem and not just a matter of convenience.
人们自动假定，刺激能够被解码的精度完全由神经系统的特性决定。我们通过表明听神经纤维中纯音强度的识别既取决于随机响应模型又取决于任意选择的刺激单元，对这一观点提出了挑战。我们揭示了一种明显自相矛盾的情况，即无法确定是高音还是低音被编码得更精确。然而，我们的结论超出了听觉神经科学的范畴，因为我们表明刺激尺度的选择是神经编码问题的一个不可或缺的部分，而不仅仅是一个便利性的问题。
