Rate,not selectivity,determines neuronal population coding accuracy in auditory cortex

The notion that neurons with higher selectivity carry more information about external sensory inputs is widely accepted in neuroscience. high-selectivity neurons respond to a narrow range of sensory inputs,and thus would be considered highly informative by rejecting a large proportion of possible inputs. in auditory cortex,neuronal responses are less selective immediately after the onset of a sound and then become highly selective in the following sustained response epoch. these 2 temporal response epochs have thus been interpreted to encode first the presence and then the content of a sound input. contrary to predictions from that prevailing theory,however,we found that the neural population conveys similar information about sound input across the 2 epochs in spite of the neuronal selectivity differences. the amount of information encoded turns out to be almost completely dependent upon the total number of population spikes in the read-out window for this system. moreover,inhomogeneous poisson spiking behavior is sufficient to account for this property. these results imply a novel principle of sensory encoding that is potentially shared widely among multiple sensory systems. © 2017 sun,barbour.