Neural Computation, Vol 9, 649-665, Copyright © 1997 by The MIT Press

LETTERS

How Well Can We Estimate the Information Carried in Neuronal Responses from Limited Samples?

David Golomb, John Hertz, Stefano Panzeri, Barry Richmond and Alessandro Treves

It is difficult to extract the information carried by neuronal responses about a set of stimuli because limited data samples result in biased estimates. Recently two improved procedures have been developed to calculate information from experimental results: a binning-and-correcting procedure and a neural network procedure. We have used data produced from a model of the spatiotemporal receptive fields of parvocellular and magnocellular lateral geniculate neurons to study the performance of these methods as a function of the number of trials used. Both procedures yield accurate results for one-dimensional neuronal codes. They can also be used to produce a reasonable estimate of the extra information in a three-dimensional code, in this instance, within 0.05 - 0.1 bit of the asymptotically calculated value--about 10% of the total transmitted information. We believe that this performance is much more accurate than previous procedures.

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