ArticlePLoS computational biology2008
Neural coding of natural stimuli: information at sub-millisecond resolution.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
52 citing papers in PubMed, 149 citations in OpenAlex.
- Axonal spike-count regimes link spinal cord stimulation periodicity to artificial sensory detection and discrimination in rodents.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Simultaneous encoding of sensory features: the role of multiplexing and noise in tactile perception and neural representation.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Inferring effective networks of spiking neurons using a continuous-time estimator of transfer entropy.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Temporal resolution of spike coding in feedforward networks with signal convergence and divergence.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Efficient coding in biophysically realistic excitatory-inhibitory spiking networks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Stimulus-invariant aspects of the retinal code drive discriminability of natural scenes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Millisecond-scale motor coding precedes sensorimotor learning in songbirds.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Panoramic visual statistics shape retina-wide organization of receptive fields.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Computational methods to study information processing in neural circuits.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2023Review
- Volitional Generation of Reproducible, Efficient Temporal Patterns.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Towards Generalizing the Information Theory for Neural Communication.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Unsupervised Bayesian Ising Approximation for decoding neural activity and other biological dictionaries.eLife · 2022Article
- Early lock-in of structured and specialised information flows during neural development.eLife · 2022Article
- Estimating Transfer Entropy in Continuous Time Between Neural Spike Trains or Other Event-Based Data.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Article
- Flexible Multielectrode Arrays With 2-D and 3-D Contacts forIEEE transactions on components, packaging, and manufacturing technology · 2020Article
- Multiscale modeling of mechanotransduction in the utricle.Journal of neurophysiology · 2019Review
- What single neurons can tell us.eLife · 2019Article
- Cellular and Network Mechanisms for Temporal Signal Propagation in a Cortical Network Model.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sensory information about the outside world is encoded by neurons in sequences of discrete, identical pulses termed action potentials or spikes. There is persistent controversy about the extent to which the precise timing of these spikes is relevant to the function of the brain. We revisit this issue, using the motion-sensitive neurons of the fly visual system as a test case. Our experimental methods allow us to deliver more nearly natural visual stimuli, comparable to those which flies encounter in free, acrobatic flight. New mathematical methods allow us to draw more reliable conclusions about the information content of neural responses even when the set of possible responses is very large. We find that significant amounts of visual information are represented by details of the spike train at millisecond and sub-millisecond precision, even though the sensory input has a correlation time of approximately 55 ms; different patterns of spike timing represent distinct motion trajectories, and the absolute timing of spikes points to particular features of these trajectories with high precision. Finally, the efficiency of our entropy estimator makes it possible to uncover features of neural coding relevant for natural visual stimuli: first, the system's information transmission rate varies with natural fluctuations in light intensity, resulting from varying cloud cover, such that marginal increases in information rate thus occur even when the individual photoreceptors are counting on the order of one million photons per second. Secondly, we see that the system exploits the relatively slow dynamics of the stimulus to remove coding redundancy and so generate a more efficient neural code.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.