• Featured in Physics
  • Editors' Suggestion

Retinal Metric: A Stimulus Distance Measure Derived from Population Neural Responses

Gašper Tkačik, Einat Granot-Atedgi, Ronen Segev, and Elad Schneidman
Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 058104 – Published 28 January 2013
Physics logo See Viewpoint: Exploring the Neural Manifold
PDFHTMLExport Citation

Abstract

The ability of an organism to distinguish between various stimuli is limited by the structure and noise in the population code of its sensory neurons. Here we infer a distance measure on the stimulus space directly from the recorded activity of 100 neurons in the salamander retina. In contrast to previously used measures of stimulus similarity, this “neural metric” tells us how distinguishable a pair of stimulus clips is to the retina, based on the similarity between the induced distributions of population responses. We show that the retinal distance strongly deviates from Euclidean, or any static metric, yet has a simple structure: we identify the stimulus features that the neural population is jointly sensitive to, and show the support-vector-machine-like kernel function relating the stimulus and neural response spaces. We show that the non-Euclidean nature of the retinal distance has important consequences for neural decoding.

  • Figure
  • Figure
  • Figure
  • Figure
  • Received 4 August 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.058104

© 2013 American Physical Society

Viewpoint

Key Image

Exploring the Neural Manifold

Published 28 January 2013

A new way to characterize the encoding of signals from the retina defines a distance between different stimuli according to the similarity of their neural responses.

See more in Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Gašper Tkačik1,*, Einat Granot-Atedgi2, Ronen Segev3, and Elad Schneidman2,†

  • 1Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Am Campus 1, A-3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria
  • 2Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, 76100 Rehovot, Israel
  • 3Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences and Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 84105 Be’er Sheva, Israel

  • *gtkacik@ist.ac.at
  • elad.schneidman@weizmann.ac.il

Article Text (Subscription Required)

Click to Expand

Supplemental Material (Subscription Required)

Click to Expand

References (Subscription Required)

Click to Expand
Issue

Vol. 110, Iss. 5 — 1 February 2013

Reuse & Permissions
Access Options
Author publication services for translation and copyediting assistance advertisement

Authorization Required


×
×

Images

×

Sign up to receive regular email alerts from Physical Review Letters

Log In

Cancel
×

Search


Article Lookup

Paste a citation or DOI

Enter a citation
×