Title
Efficient representation as a design principle for neural coding and computation
Abstract
Does the brain construct an efficient representation of the sensory world? We review progress on this question, focusing on a series of experiments in the last decade which use fly vision as a model system in which theory and experiment can confront each other. Although the idea of efficient representation has been productive, clearly it is incomplete since it doesn't tell us which bits of sensory information are most valuable to the organism. We argue that, in fact, an organism which maximizes the (biologically meaningful) adaptive value of its actions given fixed resources must have internal representations of the outside world that are optimal in a very specific information theoretic sense: they maximize the information about the future of sensory inputs at a fixed value of the information about their past. This principle contains as special cases computations which the brain seems to carry out, and it should be possible to test this optimization directly. We return to the fly visual system and report the results of preliminary experiments that are in very suggestive agreement with theory
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1109/ISIT.2006.261867
international symposium on information theory
Keywords
Field
DocType
brain,encoding,neurophysiology,brain,fly visual system,neural coding,organism,sensory information
Computer science,System testing,Neural coding,Model system,Theoretical computer science,Specific-information,Artificial intelligence,Sensory system,Adaptive value,Computation,Encoding (memory)
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-4244-0504-1
13
0.96
References 
Authors
4
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bialek, William1800194.81
Rob R. de Ruyter van Steveninck29411.07
Naftali Tishby34186894.35