Figure 10.

Decrease in benefit of joined encoding of speech for pairs of neurons from aged animals. A, Smoothed PSTHs of neuronal responses to 125 ms speech snippets from one primary-like spontaneous (plb) and one sustained spontaneous (sub) neuron from a young adult animal (top 2 rows) and from an aged animal (bottom 2 rows), respectively. B, Neuronal responses to eight speech snippets were decoded based on dissimilarity of rate responses using a distance metric. Benefit of pairwise encoding was defined as the difference between classification success of every possible pair of neuron (cells1&2) and each neuron separately (cell1, cell2). Arrows indicate benefit of paired encoding. C, Probability distribution of benefit of paired encoding for neurons from young adult (black) and aged (gray) animals. Benefit of paired encoding was significantly larger for neurons from young adult than for neurons from aged animals (Wilcoxon's rank sum test, p = 7 × 10⁻¹³).