4.6 Article

Robust information propagation through noisy neural circuits

Journal

PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
Volume 13, Issue 4, Pages -

Publisher

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005497

Keywords

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Funding

  1. new faculty start-up funds from the University of Colorado
  2. Azrieli Global Scholar Award from the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research
  3. Swiss National Science Foundation
  4. Simons Collaboration for the Global Brain
  5. Gatsby Charitable Foundation
  6. National Science Foundation [CRCNS-1208027]
  7. Simons Fellowship in Mathematics

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Sensory neurons give highly variable responses to stimulation, which can limit the amount of stimulus information available to downstream circuits. Much work has investigated the factors that affect the amount of information encoded in these population responses, leading to insights about the role of covariability among neurons, tuning curve shape, etc. However, the informativeness of neural responses is not the only relevant feature of population codes; of potentially equal importance is how robustly that information propagates to downstream structures. For instance, to quantify the retina's performance, one must consider not only the informativeness of the optic nerve responses, but also the amount of information that survives the spike-generating nonlinearity and noise corruption in the next stage of processing, the lateral geniculate nucleus. Our study identifies the set of covariance structures for the upstream cells that optimize the ability of information to propagate through noisy, nonlinear circuits. Within this optimal family are covariances with differential correlations, which are known to reduce the information encoded in neural population activities. Thus, covariance structures that maximize information in neural population codes, and those that maximize the ability of this information to propagate, can be very different. Moreover, redundancy is neither necessary nor sufficient to make population codes robust against corruption by noise: redundant codes can be very fragile, and synergistic codes can D in some cases D optimize robustness against noise.

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