Population coding with unreliable spikes
The need for a neuronal coding scheme that is robust against the corruption of action potentials seems to support the idea of population rate coding, where the relevance of a single spike decreases proportional to the increase of population size. In order to test this intuition, we here investigate the efficiency and robustness of a population rate coding scheme in comparison to a place coding scheme using identical noise model. It turns out that the efficiency of population rate coding is substantially worse than that of place coding even if the generation or propagation of spikes are highly unreliable processes.
population coding rate coding place coding reliability of spikes synaptic reliability