Abstract
The relation between physical stimuli and neurophysiological responses, such as action potentials (spikes) and Local Field Potentials (LFP), has recently been experimented in order to explain how neurons encode auditory information. However, none of these experiments presented analyses with postsynaptic potentials (PSPs). In the present study, we have estimated information values between auditory stimuli and amplitudes/latencies of PSPs and LFPs in anesthetized rats in vivo. To obtain these values, a new method of information estimation was used. This method produced more accurate estimates than those obtained by using the traditional binning method; a fact that was corroborated by simulated data. The traditional binning method could not certainly impart such accuracy even when adjusted by quadratic extrapolation. We found that the information obtained from LFP amplitude variation was significantly greater than the information obtained from PSP amplitude variation. This confirms the fact that LFP reflects the action of many PSPs. Results have shown that the auditory cortex codes more information of stimuli frequency with slow oscillations in groups of neurons than it does with slow oscillations in neurons separately.
Highlights
It is a fact well known in neuroscience that the brain is an organ with enormous computational capabilities
The kth-nearest neighbor method differs from the binning method because it does not demand discretization of the continuous variable, it does not depend on the number of bins used and, especially, it gives more accurate results. It may be concluded from the present work that Local Field Potentials (LFP) amplitudes give more information about the frequency of auditory stimuli than postsynaptic potentials (PSPs) amplitudes
This can be related to the fact that LFP includes subthreshold activity of many neurons
Summary
It is a fact well known in neuroscience that the brain is an organ with enormous computational capabilities It accomplishes a huge number of sensory activities, regulates our thoughts, emotions and behavior [1]. It remains a mystery how brain computation is done This has been the subject of various works on neural encodings and decodings [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]. In this context, the term encoding stands for the process of transforming experimentally observable sensory stimuli into neural responses.
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