Fig. 1.

Schematic diagram of information transmission by a spiking noisy neural population. Stimuli are drawn from one of two distributions : (i) “binary” distributions, where the input to each neuron is one of the μ = 1,…,K patterns of { ± 1}, i.e., ; (ii) Gaussian distributions with given covariance matrices. These h_i drive a neural response, parameterized by and neural reliability β, in Eq. 2. Positive (negative) couplings between neurons J_ij are schematically represented as green (red) links, with thickness indicating interaction strength. Each input drawn from is probabilistically mapped to binary words at the output, {σ_i}, allowing us to define the mutual information in Eq. 5 and maximize it with respect to g.