Title
Population approach to a neural discrimination task.
Abstract
This article gives insights into the possible neuronal processes involved in visual discrimination. We study the performance of a spiking network of Integrate-and-Fire (IF) neurons when performing a benchmark discrimination task. The task we adopted consists of determining the direction of moving dots in a noisy context using similar stimuli to those in the experiments of Newsome and colleagues. We present a neural model that performs the discrimination involved in this task. By varying the synaptic parameters of the IF neurons, we illustrate the counter-intuitive importance of the second-order statistics (input noise) in improving the discrimination accuracy of the model. We show that measuring the Firing Rate (FR) over a population enables the model to discriminate in realistic times, and even surprisingly significantly increases its discrimination accuracy over the single neuron case, despite the faster processing. We also show that increasing the input noise increases the discrimination accuracy but only at the expense of the speed at which we can read out the FR.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1007/s00422-005-0039-3
Biological Cybernetics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Firing Rate,Discrimination Task,Single Neuron,Excitatory Input,Inhibitory Input
Population,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Stimulus (physiology),Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
94
3
0340-1200
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
3
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Benoit Gaillard100.34
Hilary Buxton2491135.93
Jianfeng Feng364688.67