Information representation and its application to stochastic resonance

Many studies have recently focused on the temporal encoding scheme, wherein information about a stimulus is carried in temporal firing patterns of neu rons. We first show how to quantify the information conveyed in the spike t rain of an individual neuron and that in the temporal firing patterns of an ensemble of neurons, respectively, in terms of the entropy. We further app ly both the information representations to the context of stochastic resona nce. It is demonstrated that the neurons can transmit more information abou t the signals with frequencies within the range of 22-70 Hz. These enable u s to well interpret the experimental observations.