Efficient population coding depends on stimulus convergence and source of noise
Fig 2
Schematic illustrating the dominance in information of the independent- over the lumped-coding channel.
Here, we treat the case of N = 2 cells, vanishing input noise (σ = 0) and A. vanishing output noise (R → ∞), B. intermediate output noise when the total number of spikes k = k1 + k2 = 1, and C. high output noise (R → 0). Left: The relative positions of optimal thresholds of both the independent- (blue) and lumped-coding (red) channels. Right: The stimulus “estimation probabilities” for the two different channels. Yellow shading shows where the noise entropy is higher in the lumped-coding channel. α, α′, and β denote non-zero probability values (see text).