TY - JOUR
T1 - Information Tuning of Populations of Neurons in Primary Visual Cortex
AU - Kang, Kukjin
AU - Shapley, Robert M.
AU - Sompolinsky, Haim
PY - 2004/4/14
Y1 - 2004/4/14
N2 - Neurons in macaque primary visual cortex (V1) show a diversity of orientation tuning properties, exhibiting a broad distribution of tuning width, baseline activity, peak response, and circular variance (CV). Here, we studied how the different tuning features affect the performance of these cells in discriminating between stimuli with different orientations. Previous studies of the orientation discrimination power of neurons in V1 focused on resolving two nearby orientations close to the psychophysical threshold of orientation discrimination. Here, we developed a theoretical framework, the information tuning curve, that measures the discrimination power of cells as a function of the orientation difference, δθ, of the two stimuli. This tuning curve also represents the mutual information between the neuronal responses and the stimulus orientation. We studied theoretically the dependence of the information tuning curve on the orientation tuning width, baseline, and peak responses. Of main interest is the finding that narrow orientation tuning is not necessarily optimal for all angular discrimination tasks. Instead, the optimal tuning width depends linearly on δθ. We applied our theory to study the discrimination performance of a population of 490 neurons in macaque V1. We found that a significant fraction of the neuronal population exhibits favorable tuning properties for large δθ. We also studied how the discrimination capability of neurons is distributed and compared several other measures of the orientation tuning such as CV with Chernoff distances for normalized tuning curves.
AB - Neurons in macaque primary visual cortex (V1) show a diversity of orientation tuning properties, exhibiting a broad distribution of tuning width, baseline activity, peak response, and circular variance (CV). Here, we studied how the different tuning features affect the performance of these cells in discriminating between stimuli with different orientations. Previous studies of the orientation discrimination power of neurons in V1 focused on resolving two nearby orientations close to the psychophysical threshold of orientation discrimination. Here, we developed a theoretical framework, the information tuning curve, that measures the discrimination power of cells as a function of the orientation difference, δθ, of the two stimuli. This tuning curve also represents the mutual information between the neuronal responses and the stimulus orientation. We studied theoretically the dependence of the information tuning curve on the orientation tuning width, baseline, and peak responses. Of main interest is the finding that narrow orientation tuning is not necessarily optimal for all angular discrimination tasks. Instead, the optimal tuning width depends linearly on δθ. We applied our theory to study the discrimination performance of a population of 490 neurons in macaque V1. We found that a significant fraction of the neuronal population exhibits favorable tuning properties for large δθ. We also studied how the discrimination capability of neurons is distributed and compared several other measures of the orientation tuning such as CV with Chernoff distances for normalized tuning curves.
KW - Chernoff distance
KW - Discrimination
KW - Macaque monkey
KW - Orientation selectivity
KW - Population coding
KW - Primary visual cortex
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=1942489861&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=1942489861&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4272-03.2004
DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4272-03.2004
M3 - Article
C2 - 15084652
AN - SCOPUS:1942489861
SN - 0270-6474
VL - 24
SP - 3726
EP - 3735
JO - Journal of Neuroscience
JF - Journal of Neuroscience
IS - 15
ER -