Figure 4.

Effect of temporal resolution of spike times on information. (A) The response of a neuron is initially recorded as a series of spike times. To investigate the temporal resolution at which spike times carry information, the spike train is binned at a variety of different time resolutions, by labeling the response at each time with the number of spikes occurring within that bin, thereby transforming the response into a discrete integer sequence. (B) The information rate (information per unit time) about whisker deflections carried by VPm thalamic neurons as a function of bin width, Δt, used to bin neural responses (data from Montemurro et al. (2007) were redrawn and reanalyzed to create this panel). Information rate increased when decreasing the bin width even down to a resolution as fine as 0.5 ms, the limit of the experimental setup. This shows that a very fine temporal resolution is needed to read out the sensory messages carried by these thalamic spike trains.