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Abstract:
Determining the relationship between the activity of a single
nerve cell to that of an entire population is a fundamental
question that bears on the basic neural computation paradigms. In
this paper we apply an information theoretic approach to quantify
the level of cooperative activity among cells in a behavioral
context. It is possible to discriminate between synergetic activity
of the cells vs. redundant activity, depending on the difference
between the information they provide when measured jointly and the
information they provide independently. We define a synergy value
that is positive in the first case and negative in the second and
show that the synergy value can be measured by detecting the
behavioral mode of the animal from simultaneously recorded activity
of the cells. We observe that among cortical cells positive synergy
can be found, while cells from the basal ganglia, active during the
same task, do not exhibit similar synergetic activity.
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