Title
Narrow versus wide tuning curves: What's best for a population code?
Abstract
Neurophysiologists are often faced with the problem of evaluating the quality of a code for a sensory or motor variable, either to relate it to the performance of the animal in a simple discrimination task or to compare the codes at various stages along the neuronal pathway. One common belief that has emerged from such studies is that sharpening of tuning curves improves the quality of the code, although only to a certain point; sharpening beyond that is believed to be harmful. We show that this belief relies on either problematic technical analysis or improper assumptions about the noise. We conclude that one cannot tell, in the general case, whether narrow tuning curves are better than wide ones; the answer depends critically on the covariance of the noise. The same conclusion applies to other manipulations of the tuning curve profiles such as gain increase.
Year
DOI
Venue
1999
10.1162/089976699300016818
Neural Computation
Keywords
DocType
Volume
population code
Journal
11
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
0899-7667
25
PageRank 
References 
Authors
4.56
6
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alexandre Pouget123744.18
Sophie Denève217217.55
jeanchristophe ducom3797.73
Peter E. Latham426834.55