| Impact of synaptic unreliability on the information transmitted by spiking neurons (1998) | |||||||||||||||
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| Zador, Anthony. Impact of synaptic unreliability on the informa- The computational strategies available to a neuronal cirtion transmitted by spiking neurons. J. Neurophysiol. 79: 1219 – cuit depend upon the fidelity of its components. For example, 1229, 1998. The spike generating mechanism of cortical neurons the computational power of a single integrate-and-fire neuis highly reliable, able to produce spikes with a precision of a few ron depends on the effective noise of the currents driving milliseconds or less. The excitatory synapses driving these neurons the spike generator (Zador and Pearlmutter 1996). In the are by contrast much less reliable, subject both to release failures and quantal fluctuations. This suggests that synapses represent the cortex, the transformation of somatic current into an output primary bottleneck limiting the faithful transmission of information spike train appears to be highly reliable (Mainen and Sej-through cortical circuitry. How does the capacity of a neuron to nowski 1995, see also Bryant and Segundo 1976), in marked convey information depend on the properties of its synaptic drive? contrast to the unreliability of synaptic transmission (Allen We address this question rigorously in an information theoretic and Stevens 1994; Dobrunz and Stevens 1997; Stratford et framework. We consider a model in which a population of independent unreliable synapses provides the drive to an integrate-and-fire | |||||||||||||||
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