Abstract
Recent neurophysiological experiments have demonstrated a remarkable effect of attention on the underlying neural activity that suggests for the first time that information encoding is indeed actively influenced by attention. Single cell recordings show that attention reduces both the neural variability and correlations in the attended condition with respect to the non-attended one. This reduction of variability and redundancy enhances the information associated with the detection and further processing of the attended stimulus. Beyond the attentional paradigm, the local activity in a neural circuit can be modulated in a number of ways, leading to the general question of understanding how the activity of such circuits is sensitive to these relatively small modulations. Here, using an analytically tractable neural network model, we demonstrate how this enhancement of information emerges when excitatory and inhibitory synaptic currents are balanced. In particular, we show that the network encoding sensitivity -as measured by the Fisher information- is maximized at the exact balance. Furthermore, we find a similar result for a more realistic spiking neural network model. As the regime of balanced inputs has been experimentally observed, these results suggest that this regime is functionally important from an information encoding standpoint.
Highlights
Cognitive behavior requires an efficient selection of relevant information from the enormous amount of sensory information continuously flowing into the brain
The perceptual system performs this selective filtering process by relying on attentional mechanisms by which a behaviorally relevant stimulus in the environment is enhanced relative to other irrelevant distractors
Experiments have shown that attention affects the neural variability –as measured by the Fano factor- and correlations over trials [6,7,8]
Summary
Cognitive behavior requires an efficient selection of relevant information from the enormous amount of sensory information continuously flowing into the brain. Experiments have shown that attention affects the neural variability –as measured by the Fano factor- and correlations over trials [6,7,8] In these experiments, single cells in V4 were recorded in awake behaving monkeys when one stimulus in the neuron’s receptive field was behaviorally attended or nonattended. Several studies across a variety of species, cortical areas, brain states and stimulus conditions have found that stimulus onset generally reduces neural variability [9] These attention induced reductions suggest an enhancement of the information necessary to select and further process the relevant stimulus. These reductions improve the signal-to-noise ratio and eliminate redundancy, both crucial features for enhancing the encoding of information
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