Rate Coding Versus Temporal Order Coding: What the Retinal Ganglion Cells Tell the Visual Cortex

摘要

It is often supposed that the messages sent to the visual cortex by the retinal ganglion cells are encoded by the mean firing rates observed on spike trains generated with a Poisson process. Using an information trans- mission approach, we evaluate the performances of two such codes, one based on the spike count and the other on the mean interspike interval, and compare the results with a rank order code, where the first ganglion cells to emit a spike are given a maximal weight.