Narrow Versus Wide Tuning Curves: What's Best for a Population Code?

摘要

Neurophysiologists are often faced with the problem of evaluating the quality of a cod for a sensory or motor variable, either to relate it to the performance of the animal in a simple discrimination task or to compare the codes at various stages along the neuronal pathway. One common belief that has emerged from such studies is that sharpening of tuning curves improves the quality of the code, although only to a certain point; sharpening beyond that is believed to be harmful.