preview

Information Processing With Population Codes Essay

Decent Essays

Just to start off, we are going to go over a quick background on my paper and some terms to get a better understanding beforehand. The paper I was assigned is called, Information Processing with Population Codes. It is written by Alexandre Pouget, Peter Dayan, and Richard Zemel. Alexandre Pouget is a professor at the Neuroscience Centre at the University of Geneva. There he leads the computational cognitive neuroscience laboratory; his research focuses on theories of representation and computation within Neural Circuits. Alexandre Pouget is the lead author of this paper.

This paper focuses on neural coding and population codes, which are heavily interrelated. Neural Coding is a field in Cognitive Science that is concerned with the …show more content…

This is where the start of population coding formed. I personally find it amazing that we can compare two separate things that are unlike in many ways such as computers and our nervous system. There are so many things that are similar even though they are so unlike, such as there is one thing controlling the whole system like in our bodies our nervous system controls us.

An example of the population coding that is presented within the paper is “place cells” within rats. We are able to use these cells to show the animals location with regards to a centred reference frame in the surrounding environment of the rat. In this experiment, they use a small maze, each area is characterized by one of these “place cells”. Within this area there is a small region of the maze that is triggered and sends a response. Through observing the rats, they saw that there was a spatial overlap between the fields and thus, they concluded that the cells would respond to any location that they are given. They also found that visual features were also encoded within these population codes, for example, orientation, colour, direction of motion, and depth. So far, it has been shown that our environmental influences effect our behaviour so heavily. Population encoding is very strongly rooted, if one cell is damaged it won’t affect the already encoded representation. Just as if one part of a computer goes, most of the time the remaining parts of the device

Get Access