CODING OF VISUAL INFORMATION BY PRECISELY CORRELATED SPIKES IN THE LATERAL GENICULATE-NUCLEUS

Correlated firing among neurons is widespread in the nervous system. P recisely correlated spiking, occurring on a millisecond time scale, ha s recently been observed among neurons in the lateral geniculate nucle us with overlapping receptive fields. We have used an information-theo retic analysis to examine the role of these correlations in visual cod ing. Considerably more information can be extracted from two cells if temporal correlations between them are considered. The percentage incr ease in information depends on the degree of correlation; the average increase is approximately 20% for strongly correlated pairs. Thus, pre cise temporal correlation could be used as an additional information c hannel from thalamus to visual cortex.