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- T. Hoch, G. Wenning, and
K. Obermayer. The Effect of Correlations in the Background Activity on the
Information Transmission Properties of Neural Populations.
.
Neurocomputing, 65-66:365-370, 2005.
Recently the information transmission properties of populations of
neurons with independent noise inputs were examined and it was shown that
noise can improve the transmission of sub-threshold signals. Information
transmission is maximized at a certain noise level which, in general, depends
on the population size. In the central nervous system of higher animals,
however, the noise is likely to be correlated. In this paper we therefore
investigate the effect of correlations between neurons on the information
transmission properties of populations of neurons. We show that correlations
in the noise inputs of neurons not only decrease information transmission but
also immediately reduce the optimal population noise level to that of the
single neuron. Hence, information about the population size does not need to
be made available to the single neuron and therefore local adaptation rules
as suggested in Wenning et al. (PRL, 2003) suffice.
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