Error-Robust Modes of the Retinal Population Code

Jason S. Prentice, Olivier Marre, Mark L. Ioffe, Adrianna Loback, Gasper Tkacik, Michael J. Berry II

Abstract: Author Summary Neurons in most parts of the nervous system represent and process information in a collective fashion, yet the nature of this collective code is poorly understood. An important constraint placed on any such collective processing comes from the fact that individual neurons’ signaling is prone to corruption by noise. The information theory and engineering literatures have studied error-correcting codes that allow individual noise-prone coding units to “check” each other, forming an overall representation that is robust to errors. In this paper, we have analyzed the population code of one of the best-studied neural systems, the retina, and found that it is structured in a manner analogous to error-correcting schemes. Indeed, we found that the complex activity patterns over ~150 retinal ganglion cells, the output neurons of the retina, could be mapped onto collective code words, and that these code words represented precise visual information while suppressing noise. In order to analyze this coding scheme, we introduced a novel quantitative model of the retinal output that predicted neural activity patterns more accurately than existing state-of-the-art approaches.